although we vastly prefer our own, and ourselves for being able to appreciate it, "would it not be rash to conclude that there was NO passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the thin music of a mandolin?" The poets of Johnson's time, himself included, seem to have been able to play with a feeling which quite masters us; yet they played with it fondly, and kindly, and tenderly, and as if they even reverenced it too, in their own way. All things are not given to every man, nor to every age.

Johnson had now reached his seventeenth year, when he left school for ever, and returned home to Lichfield.

The picture of young Samuel during these early school-days is that of a lad of rough but strong-built frame; with a countenance not naturally uncomely, but disfigured by disease; with sharp though near-sighted eyes, and a rather ungainly manner and appearance; reading voraciously all sorts of books, but feeding chiefly in the fields of chivalrous romance and poetry; poring over "Hamlet" in his own little room until the ghost-scene frightens him off to bed; neglecting his proper work to do the exercises of his fellow-pupils; sauntering away the vacation-hours in the fields, with a companion or without; and always talking, talking, oftener to himself than to his companions; seldom or never punished by his masters except for talking and distracting the attention of his neighbours; learning without the slightest difficulty what costs others a world of labour; doing his own work so easily that he often seems to others, and even to himself, to be doing nothing at all; wearing both his powers and his clothes so loosely that he can shuffle them off and on without any tugging or straining; ambitious to excel, yet too indolent to exert his full energies except by starts; always desultory, yet always storing up; letting long spells of work alternate with strong fits of idleness, but laying a sure foundation all the while for the massive superstructure of his after-life: a lad in whom a good eye can discern the makings of a great man; for "the Man is only the Boy writ large, and with an extensive commentary."

REPOSE.

9

CHAPTER II.

REPOSE-AT COLLEGE-ON THE WORLD.

(1726-1734).

AFTER his return from Stourbridge school Johnson spent two years at home, in comparative idleness, which was nevertheless fruitful. He read a great deal in an irregular sort of way, but, having formed no settled plan of life, his studies were naturally desultory and unsystematic. His reading was not confined to "light literature," as it is called, "not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers, all manly." In after days he was wont to speak of this period of his life as a deplorably idle and barren one; yet he generally concluded his account by saying, "I would not have you think I was doing nothing then." And the truth is, he was doing much; he was amassing riches which were afterwards to be scattered abroad; he was storing up food against the coming hours of famine and distress. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"-and the good. On the truth of this maxim Samuel Johnson reposed for the space of two whole years. And it is good to lie by in this way till the call make itself distinctly heard. These quiet listening years are not time misspent ; for

At the age of nineteen he left Lichfield for Oxford University, and was entered a commoner of Pembroke College on the 31st of October, 1728. Just before leaving home, his old schoolmistress, Dame Oliver, hearing that he was about to take his departure, had paid him a farewell visit, and, in the simplicity of her heart, had brought him a present of gingerbread as the fittest

token of goodwill which she could think of. In after years, Johnson was fond of retailing this little incident, and used laughingly to say "that this was as high a proof of his merit as he could have received." His father accompanied him to Oxford, and, in presenting his son to the University Magnates, was loud in the praises of his boy. Johnson's figure and manner, indeed, occasioned some surprise; but his modesty and respectful behaviour in their presence made a favourable impression on the company. In the course of conversation, also, he had an opportunity of evidencing the great amount of his reading; and Doctor Adams, the Master of the College, afterwards told him that he was “the best qualified for the University that he had ever known come there."

Of his tutor here, Mr. Jorden, he once gave the following account:-" He was a very worthy man, but a heavy man, and I did not profit much by his instructions. Indeed, I did not attend him much. The first day after I came to college, I waited upon him, and then stayed away four. On the sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered, I had been sliding in Christ-Church meadow and this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you. I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor." BosWELL: "That, sir, was great fortitude of mind." JOHNSON: "No, sir, stark insensibility."

But if Mr. Jorden's intellect did not inspire reverence in his pupil, his goodness of heart awoke in him true love. "Whenever," said Johnson, "a young man becomes Jorden's pupil, he becomes his son." And, perhaps, it is proper to direct attention thus early to the fact that Johnson had a blunt, honest, manly way of denouncing his own faults which is apt to mislead a hasty reader and to be taken as meaning too much. If there ever lived a man who is to be taken, not at his own valuation, but greatly above it, that man was Samuel Johnson. He was always his own severest critic; and such an one has very little to fear from the harsh judgments of others. More, perhaps, than any other feature of his character it is this constant and strict habit of self-castigation in matters pertaining to the conscience, that makes

it a species of grand moral training to follow him from the cradle on to the grave.

From his father Johnson had inherited, among other things, "a vile melancholy," which, to use his own exaggerated words, "made him mad all his life, at least not sober." In his twentieth year, during the Oxford recess of 1729, this demon of hypochondria assailed him with dreadful ferocity. He tried to exorcise the evil spirit by hard walking, to Birmingham and back again, for instance; and by a hundred other expedients. But all to no purpose; as he himself says, "I did not then know how to manage it." Sometimes, when the disease was most violent, he became so listless, and so utterly dispirited, and so intellectually vacuous, that he could not even distinguish the hour upon the town-clock. Several of his friends feared that this trouble might prove the oncoming of actual insanity; and his own morbid imagination took up the dread only too readily. It never resulted in that; but he suffered periodical attacks of the same distemper during all the rest of his life.

It was during this college-period also that, according to his own account, the first serious and rational impressions upon religious subjects were made on his mind :-" When at Oxford, I took up 'Law's Serious Call to a Holy Life,' expecting to find it a dull 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 of religion, after I became capable of rational inquiry."

About his particular studies at Oxford not much is known. What he read solidly there was, he tells us, "Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little Epigram;" what he was fondest of was Metaphysics, but he does not lay claim to having gone very profoundly into that branch of mental culture. The truth is, he hardly ever read any book from beginning to end; but he had a gift, by no means common, of getting at the soul of a work very easily and very He would suck the marrow out of a book as a weasel sucks eggs." All that was really valuable in the literature that came before him he thus made his own, and, having once

soon.

mastered it, it was his for ever. That in a book which he could live upon he "devoured." His passion for acquiring knowledge was insatiable. One day, at Oxford, while sitting alone in his room, he was overheard muttering this soliloquy 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."

But these visions of world-wide travel were all a dream, for Johnson was, at that very moment, finding it almost impossible to maintain himself longer here at Oxford. Under such circumstances, we shall not grudge the poor fellow his pleasing illusion, for

"The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope."

His wretchedness, too, was of that worst of all kinds which finds itself forced to look gay and happy. When told in after years that Doctor Adams had spoken of him as "a gay and frolicksome fellow at College," he said, "Ah, sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. 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."

We have all heard laughter with no true ring of fun in it, and seen wild revelry which had its source far on the other side of mirth. Poor Johnson's laughter and revelry were, just then, of this truly pitiable sort. Some of his Oxford contemporaries used to relate that "he was generally seen lounging at the college-gate, with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with his wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the college discipline." So the Oxford Student is but the Stourbridge Schoolboy of a larger growth, with one or two new elements of bitterness and desperation which untoward circumstances have developed in his character.

The following anecdote will give a clear idea, but a sad one,