John Wain's Johnson

I love biographers who like their subjects. I'm reading John Wain's biography of Samuel Johnson. I discovered this book some 40 years ago, when I was feeling guilty for never having read Boswell. I still have not read, and don't plan to read, Boswell (I've read a biography of Boswell), but I've read Wain's book more than once. Probably more than twice, but not in the past ten years or so.

Johnson had faults--in his own self-concept, more faults than virtues; but he was a great mind, a mind greater than his huge lumbering, scrofulous, spastically moving, short-sighted body. I am in love with Samuel Johnson's mind, and with Wain's book.