Carl Rollyson Quote

Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson’s company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days with Michael. Boswell knew Johnson much longer (more than twenty years), but he did not live with his subject and see him throughout the entire course of a day and night. I was with Michael from breakfast through to dinner in the evening and everything in between and usually more talk right up until bedtime. I watched the cycle of Michael’s days and became a part of them, sometimes locking up the house at night or taking messages when he was away for part of a day—and once having to rush down the stairs of his Hampstead house and into the street to pick up him when he had tripped and fallen.