JOHNSON.

335 him say, what ought to be recorded to the honour of the present venerable master of that college, the reverend WILLIAM ADAMS, D.D., who was then very young, and one of the junior fellows, that the mild but judicious expostulations of this worthy man, whose virtue awed him and whose learning he revered, made him really ashamed of himself, "though I fear," said he, "I was too proud to own it."

'I have heard from some of his contemporaries that he was generally seen lounging at the college gate with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the college discipline, which in his maturer years he so much extolled'. He would not let these idlers say "prodigious," or otherwise misuse the English tongue.'

'Even then, sir,' Oliver Edwards told Boswell half a century afterwards, he was delicate in language, and we all feared him.'

Dr. Adams told Boswell that Johnson was caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicsome fellow, and passed at Pembroke the happiest part of his life. When Boswell mentioned this to him he replied, 'Ah, sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority.' His lines in the Vanity of Human Wishes reflect the lot which he had tasted :—

'When first the college rolls receive his name,
The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;
Through all his veins the fever of renown
Spreads from the strong contagion of the gown.
O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread,
And Bacon's mansion trembles o'er his head.

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause awhile from letters to be wise.
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the garret [patron] and the jail.'

Dr. Birkbeck Hill, whose pious care for the glory of the greatest son of his College has brought to light everything, probably, that can be known about Johnson's residence at Pembroke, shows from the batell books that his weekly bills were not particularly small. They range from 7s. 11d. to 12s. 6d. Carlyle, in the modern picturesque style, depicts the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned servitor starving in view of

1 Fifty years later he complained that subordination was sadly broken down in Colleges, as everywhere else.

the empty or locked buttery. Mr. Leslie Stephen also, without the excuse of ignorance, talks about 'servitors and sizars.' Johnson was not a servitor and did not starve. He did not wait, but was waited upon. He was fag-master, not fag. It was the practice for a servitor, by order of the Master, to go round to the rooms of the young men and, knocking at the door, to enquire if they were within, and if no answer was returned to report them absent. Johnson could not endure this intrusion, and would frequently be silent when the utterance of a word would have ensured him from censure, and . . . would join with others of the young men in hunting, as they called it, the servitor who was thus diligent in his duty; and this they did with the noise of pots and candlesticks, singing to the tune of "Chevy Chase" the words of that old ballad—

"To drive the deer with hound and horn."

Johnson's room was over the gateway, at what used to be the top of the tower, but is now the second floor. Dr. Jeune often heard an aged College servant identify it. In 1784, a little before his death, Johnson had a desire to mount once more the narrow winding stair. He was very infirm, and the porter had to push him up. This janitor was alive in 1837, and gave the account to Mr. J. Coke Fowler', who matriculated in 1833. Boswell, who also specifies its position, says, 'The enthusiast of learning will ever contemplate it with veneration." The front window is only a yard or two from the Master's house, and one day Dr. Panting heard Johnson soliloquizing in his strong, emphatic voice: 'Well, I have a mind to see what is done in other places of learning. I'll go and visit the Universities abroad. I'll go to France and Italy. I'll go to Padua—And I'll mind my business. For an Athenian blockhead is the worst of all blockheads.' Dr. Adams told Boswell this. Johnson himself related that one day, as he was turning the key of his chamber, he heard his mother, who was at Lichfield, distinctly call him by name. Perhaps it was here that he began to learn the flageolet. The rooms are internally almost unchanged, though half a century ago (and again in December, 1871) they narrowly escaped destruction. The Rev. N. Howard M'Gachen (matr. 1844) writes :—

'During my residence a fire broke out in the rooms once occupied by Dr. Johnson, and the furniture was hurriedly removed to a place of safety. Among other articles there was a self-acting piano or some such instrument. In the act of removal the button was accidentally touched, which set the music going, and it was melancholy to hear it, in the quad, playing some lively air while the fire was going on above.'

1 From 1853 a stipendiary magistrate in South Wales.

The staircase balusters must be the same which Johnson clutched in his headlong descents after the flying servitor. Any one who has occupied that narrow stair can imagine the noise of his unwieldy body tumbling down it in hot pursuit.

In those days there was no distinction of senior and junior commonroom. For one thing, the Fellows were usually younger than they are now. In one of Johnson's later visits to Oxford, Dr. Adams told him that in some of the Colleges the Fellows had excluded the students from social intercourse with them in the common-room. Johnson approved of this. They are in the right, sir: there can be no real conversation, no fair exertion of mind amongst them, if the young men are by.' They walked with Dr. Adams into the Master's garden and into the common-room. JOHNSON (after a rêverie of meditation): 'Aye! here I used to play at draughts with Phil Jones and Fludyer, Jones loved beer, and did not get very forward in the Church. Fludyer turned out a scoundrel, a whig, and said he was ashamed of having been bred at Oxford. He had a living at Putney, and got under the eye of some retainers to the court at that time, and so became a violent whig: but he had been a scoundrel all along to be sure.' BOSWELL: Was he a scoundrel, sir, in any other way than that of being a political Scoundrel? Did he cheat at draughts?' JOHNSON: Sir, we never played for money?'

The summer common-room at Pembroke on the town-wall was, till its demolition in 1869, the only one left in Oxford, except that at Merton. Dean Burgon wrote in 1855: This agreeable and picturesque apartment was in constant use within the memory of the present Master; but, while I write, it is in a state of considerable decadence. The old chairs are drawn up against the panelled walls; on the small circular tables the stains produced by hot beverages are very plainly to be distinguished only the guests are wanting, with their pipes and aletheir wigs and buckles-their byegone manners and forgotten topics of discourse.' When Johnson revisited this room with Dr. Adams,

1 Having choice of rooms on first coming to the College, a freshman's religious reverence led the historian to become the occupant of this eyrie. After a term or two I deemed myself unworthy of the spot, and, one of the largest rooms in College falling vacant, moved in locum spatiosum.

* Fludyer was on the Wightwick foundation, and was of Johnson's standing. 'Nov. 27, 1728. Joh. Fludyer, 16. Joh. fil. Abingdon. Com. Berk. Gen. fil.' His father was Mayor of Abingdon in 1722, and excused from serving in 1757 on account of his 'great age.' Jones was a year senior. 1727. Dec. 5. Phil Jones 18. Rich. fil. Seti Petri in Ballivo Civ. Oxon. Gen. fil.' In the buttery book is scrawled: 'O yes, O yes, come forth Phil Jones, and answer to your charge for exceeding the batells,' with other uncomplimentary references.

smoking in common-room was being discontinued. A Latin poem, recited in the Theatre on July 8, 1773, at Lord North's Installation, decrying the change of times, speaks of the

'Camerae Communis amor, quâ rarus ad alta Nunc tubus emittit gratos laquearia fumos'.'

Boswell says that he cannot find that Johnson formed any close 'intimacies' with his fellow-collegians. He was senior to Shenstone, Blackstone, Graves, Hawkins, and Whitefield, none of whom matriculated before he left. Two of his contemporaries 'got forward in the Church,' FRANCIS POTTER, Prebendary of Bath and Wells, Archdeacon of Taunton and of Wells, and WILLIAM VYSE, Treasurer of Lichfield Cathedral and Archdeacon of Salop.

When Johnson first entered the College Adams told him that he was the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there. But his reading at Oxford, as all through his life, was desultory and fitful. He gorged half a book and left the rest untasted. In October, 1729, at the beginning of his last term, he made fierce resolutions against sloth: 'Desidiae valedixi; syrenis istius cantibus surdam posthac aurem obversurus.' Yet he considered method in reading to be mischievous.

He told Boswell that what he read solidly at Pembroke was Greek -not the historians, but Homer and Euripides, and a little epigram. He was fondest, however, of metaphysics, but did not go deeply into them. Indeed he was not metaphysical, as his refutation of Berkleyism by dashing his foot against a post evinces. One book he read which deeply impressed his mind. He had been a lax talker, rather than thinker, against religion till he went to Oxford. When at Oxford I took up Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life, expecting to find it a dull

In the Oxford Sausage the ex-fellow who has taken a living regrets the time 'When calm around the common room

I puff'd my daily pipe's perfume!
Rode for a stomach, and inspected
At annual bottlings, corks selected,
And dined untax'd, untroubled, under

The portrait of our pious Founder.'

" He observed many years later: 'Idleness is a disease which must be combated; but I would not advise a rigid adherence to a particular plan of study. I myself have never persisted in any plan for two days together. A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good. A young man should read five hours in a day and so may acquire a great deal of knowledge.' Dr. Johnson was ignorant that the end of education is to pass examinations. An old gentleman gave him some advice when at College which he often recalled: 'Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find poring upon books will be but an irksome task.' Johnson, though not a diligent, was a voracious and feverish reader.

book, as such books generally are, and perhaps to laugh at it. But I found Law quite an overmatch for me; and this was the first occasion of my thinking in earnest about religion.' The non-juror's strangely impressive blending of masculine common sense, literary raciness, and mystical piety was exactly what was likely to lay hold on a mind like Johnson's. He called it 'the finest piece of hortatory theology in any language.' A book which he found in the College Library fascinated him-the Portuguese Jesuit Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia. This, after leaving Oxford, he borrowed, to translate it out of French into English. It subsequently suggested to him the plan of Rasselas. He does not appear to have returned the book.

Boswell says: 'Dr. Adams, the worthy and respectable master of Pembroke College, has generally had the reputation of being Johnson's tutor. The fact, however is, that in 1731 Mr. Jorden quitted the college and his pupils were transferred to Dr. Adams; so that, had Johnson returned, Dr. Adams would have been his tutor. It is to be wished that this connexion had taken place. His equal temper, mild disposition, and politeness of manners might have insensibly softened the harshness of Johnson. . . . Dr. Adams paid Johnson this high compliment. He said to me at Oxford in 1776, "I was his nominal tutor; but he was above my mark." When I repeated it to Johnson his eyes flashed with grateful satisfaction, and he exclaimed, "That was liberal and noble."'

Adams' compliment certainly appears to imply that Johnson was actually under his tuition, and supports the positive assertion of Boswell as to the length of Johnson's residence:—

"The "res angusta domi" prevented him from having the advantage of a complete academical education. The friend to whom he had trusted for support had deceived him. His debts in College, though not great, were increasing; and his scanty remittances from Lichfield could be supplied no longer, his father having fallen into a state of insolvency. Compelled therefore by irresistible necessity, he left the college in autumn, 1731, without a degree, having been a member of it little more than three years.'

We have also Johnson's remark to Boswell that he was at Pembroke with Whitefield, and (smiling) 'knew him before he began to be better than other people.' But this is inexplicable, and proves too much; for Whitefield entered in November, 1732, whereas Johnson had footed it to Bosworth some months before1.

11732, Julii 16. Bosvortiam pedes petii.' He divided his father's effects the day before. It is difficult to account for the years 1730 and 1731. The Memoirs