THE PORTABLE JOHNSON AND BOSWELL

Perennial interest in Johnson and Boswell should provide a ready market for this excellent addition to the Portable Library. The editor's aim is -- not only to offer what he feels is representative of the best of both -- but to restore a sense of balance in giving due recognition to Johnson as something more than a great conversationalist immortalized by Boswell, and to show him as biographer, critic, poet as well. Boswell, with half the space, is represented best by his own artistic- and creative- best, the biography, supplemented by bits from the pens of others which serve to show Boswell's own rare achievement in selection. Brief and pungent appraisals of the two men and their writings -- the reasons for his choice of material intended to reveal mind and character as well as the best of their work. From Boswell,- extracts from the Life, from the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides ; from Johnson, the essay on Savage, on Pope, letters, poems, Preface to Shakespeare, Conclusion to the Preface to the Dictionary.