Lord Macaulay’s essays were required reading for most students in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. They had a great influence on the opinion formed about Boswell since Macaulay was considered to be a versatile genius, an icon. During the period of Macaulay’s reign it has been estimated that for every 100 of his readers there was 1 who read the "Life of Johnson".

Macaulay describes Boswell:

“Homer is no more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second…. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was … a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect … He was a laughing stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon … Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and 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. Most men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, toad-eating, the insensitivity to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book.”