"I wish you had read more books."

From Peter Martin's A Life of James Boswell. James Boswell has confessed to Samuel Johnson that "I don't talk much from books; but there is a very good reason for it. I have not read many books." To which Johnson replies, foreshadowing the plea of many reading researchers today that the more one reads the more one knows and the more one knows, the more one reads:

I wish you had read more books. The foundation must be laid by reading. General principles must be had from books. But they must be brought to the test of real life. In conversation, you never get a system.

Boswell was well aware of his deficiencies in systematic learning.

There is an imperfection, a superficialness, in all my notions. I understand nothing clearly, nothing to the bottom. I pick up fragments, but never have in my memory a mass of any size. I wonder really if it be possible for me to acquire any one part of knowledge fully.

For all that this was a serious issue for him, Boswell also recognized his true talent as a catalyst.

I am a quick fire, a taper, which can light up a great and lasting fire though itself is soon extinguished.

For all that self-knowledge, Boswell was ever a slave to his appetites and distractions. Wine, women and song were ever present hurdles to the course of action he knew he ought to pursue. Samuel Johnson decided to assist Boswell. "He is to buy for me a chest of books of his choosing off stalls, and I am to read more and drink less. That was his counsel."

Johnson did buy those books and had them delivered to Boswell but apparently they sat untended on shelves. There is also no evidence that Boswell ever drank less.

I wonder just which books those might have been to be so estimated by the author of the first English dictionary?