Few eighteenth-century literary figures are more congenial to the twentieth than Boswell. Had he lived today it can hardly be doubted that he would have excelled in the art of the interview. His alertness to the strategy of the situation, his sensitivity to the potentialities of his own role, are unrivalled. He is as happy interviewing a porter at the door of a cockfight (“I have great pleasure in conversing with the lower part of mankind, who have very curious ideas”) as interrogating General Paoli, Rousseau, or Voltaire, and he is fully aware of the value his public will assign to each. His wish is for fame and money: in his time the pursuits of literature and criticism might seem to offer unrivalled opportunities for both.

Boswell's criticism, however, is not that of the professional, but the amateur. Unlike Johnson, who was responsible to booksellers, to his public, to the tradition of authors and critics whose values he interpreted for his own times in the “common pursuit of true judgement,” Boswell chose as his models the fashionable and the successful. The instincts of the journalist seem to dissipate his recorded literary interests into the occasional sensitive response or commonsense observation. Even in the series of papers he wrote for the London Magazine he discusses only four specifically literary topics: Periodicals, Authorship and Revision, Criticism, and Diaries. It is hardly surprising that, although on occasion he may seem to challenge Johnson to advantage in specific critical judgements – notably on Fielding, for example – there has been little attention paid to criticism as one of Boswell's strengths {Life, II, 175).