<P> The cause for concern is that Boswell's original Life "corrects" many of Johnson's quotations, censors many of the more vulgar comments, and largely ignores Johnson's early years . In particular, Boswell creates a somewhat mythic version of Johnson, as William Dowling puts it: </P> <P> In a sense, the Life's portrayal of Johnson as a moral hero begins in myth...As the biographical story unfolds, of course, this image dissolves and there emerges the figure of an infinitely more complex and heroic Johnson whose moral wisdom is won through a constant struggle with despair, whose moral sanity is balanced by personal eccentricities too visible to be ignored, and whose moral penetration derives from his own sense of tragic self - deception . Yet the image never dissolves completely, for in the end we realize there has been an essential truth in the myth all along, that the idealized and disembodied image of Johnson existing in the mind of his public...In this way the myth serves to expand and authenticate the more complex image of Johnson ". </P> <P> Modern biographers have since corrected Boswell's errors . This is not to say that Boswell's work is wrong or of no use: scholars such as Walter Jackson Bate appreciate the "detail" and the "treasury of conversation" that it contains . All of Johnson's biographers, according to Bate, have to go through the same "igloo" of material that Boswell had to deal with: limited information from Johnson's first forty years and an extreme amount for those after . Simply put, "Johnson's life continues to hold attention" and "every scrap of evidence relating to Johnson's life has continued to be examined and many more details have been added" because "it is so close to general human experience in a wide variety of ways". </P> <P> Edmund Burke told King George III that the work entertained him more than any other . Robert Anderson, in his Works of the British Poets (1795), wrote: "With some venial exceptions on the score of egotism and indiscriminate admiration, his work exhibits the most copious, interesting, and finished picture of the life and opinions of an eminent man, that was ever executed; and is justly esteemed one of the most instructive and entertaining books in the English language ." </P>

Why does boswell want to write a biography of samuel johnson