[4] This journal, when published in the 20th century, filled eighteen volumes, and it was on this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson's life.

[4] Johnson, in commenting on Boswell's excessive note-taking, playfully wrote to Hester Thrale, "One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me".

[13] Furthermore, Greene claims that the work "began with a well-organized press campaign, by Boswell and his friends, of puffing and of denigration of his rivals; and was given a boost by one of Macaulay's most memorable pieces of journalistic claptrap".

[20] Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote: "With some venial exceptions on the score of egotism and indiscriminate admiration, his work exhibits the most copious, interesting, and finished picture of the life and opinions of an eminent man, that was ever executed; and is justly esteemed one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language.

Boswell knew that the charm of Biography is a certain capricious levity that follows all the rambling of conversation; that the Biographer should be utterly forgotten; that the reader should feel acquainted with the man of whom he reads, without remembering a single word that he has read: — but in the execution of these just conceptions, Boswell is continually jogging your elbow, and begging you to forget him; he is incessantly crowding upon your notice.

[22]Macaulay's critique in the Edinburgh Review[23] was highly influential and established a way of thinking of Boswell and his Life of Johnson which was to prevail for many years.

[23] And the famously ambivalent opinion Macaulay gave of Boswell himself was that the unquestioned excellence of the Life was possible only because of traits and habits of Boswell's that Macaulay saw as contemptible: "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London[;] ... such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be".

[23] Macaulay also criticised (as did Lockhart) what he saw as a lack of discretion in the way the Life reveals Johnson's and others' personal lives, foibles, habits and private conversation; but contended that it was this that made the Life of Johnson a great biography.Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensitivity to all reproof, he could never have produced so excellent a book.

He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

[23] Macaulay noted that Boswell could give a detailed account only of Johnson's later years: "We know him [Johnson], not as he was known to men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been"[23] and that long after Johnson's own works had been forgotten, he would be remembered through Boswell's Life:... that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures of those among whom we have been brought up, the gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick.

The reputation of those writings, which he probably expected to be immortal, is every day fading; while those peculiarities of manner and that careless table-talk the memory of which, he probably thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe ..."[23]Thomas Carlyle wrote two essays in Fraser's Magazine in 1832 in review of Croker's edition.

[25] Carlyle wanted more than facts from histories and biographies: "The thing I want to see is not Redbook Lists and Court Calendars, and Parliamentary Registers, but the LIFE OF MAN in England: what men did, thought, suffered, enjoyed; the form, especially the spirit, of their terrestrial existence, its outward environment, its inward principle; how and what it was; whence it proceeded, whither it was tending.

"[25] Carlyle professed to find this in the Life, even in its simplest anecdotes: "Some slight, perhaps mean and even ugly incident if real and well presented, will fix itself in a susceptive memory and lie ennobled there[24]".

Boswell, though "a foolish, inflated creature, swimming in an element of self-conceit"[25]), had had, said Carlyle, the great good sense to admire and attach himself to Dr Johnson (an attachment which had little to offer materially) and the open loving heart which Carlyle thought indispensable for knowing and vividly uttering forth[24]:Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and childlike Open-mindedness.

His sneaking sycophancies, his greediness and forwardness, whatever was bestial and earthy in him, are so many blemishes in his Book, which still disturb us in its clearness; wholly hindrances, not helps.

[25] That loose-flowing, careless-looking Work of his is as a picture by one of Nature's own Artists; the best possible resemblance of a Reality; like the very image thereof in a clear mirror.

Frederick Pottle calls the Life "the crowning achievement of an artist who for more than twenty five years had been deliberately disciplining himself for such a task.

"[29] Similarly, although Donald Greene thought that Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides a "splendid performance", he felt that the Life was inadequate and Johnson's later years deserved a more accurate biography.

Malone inserted the additions in the text, adding some bracketed and credited notes by himself and other contributors, including Boswell's son James.

[37] The weakness of Croker's notes, criticised by both reviewers, is acknowledged by George Birkbeck Hill: "His remarks and criticisms far too often deserve the contempt that Macaulay so liberally poured on them.