Samuel Johnson entered as a Commoner October 31st, 1728, aged nineteen. Old Michael Johnson anxiously introduced him to Mr. Jorden, his tutor. “He seemed very full of the merits of his son, and told the company he was a good scholar and a poet, and wrote Latin verses. His figure and manner appeared strange to them; but he behaved modestly, and sate silent, till, upon something which occurred in the course of conversation, he struck in and quoted Macrobius.” Johnson told Boswell that Jorden was “a very worthy man, but a heavy man.” He told Mrs. Thrale that “when he was first entered at the University he passed a morning, in compliance with the customs of the place, at his tutor’s chamber; but, finding him no scholar, went no more. In about ten days after, meeting Mr. Jorden in the street, he offered to pass without saluting him; but the tutor stopped and enquired, not roughly neither, what he had been doing? ‘Sliding on the ice,’ was the reply; and so turned away with disdain. He laughed very heartily at the recollection of his own insolence, and said they endured it from him with a gentleness that whenever he thought of it astonished himself.” Once, being fined for non-attendance, he rudely retorted, “Sir, you have sconced me twopence for a lecture not worth a penny.” Dr. Adams, however, told Boswell that Johnson attended his tutor’s lectures and those given in the Hall very regularly. Jorden quite won his heart. “That creature would defend his pupils to the last; no young lad under his care should suffer for committing slight irregularities, while he had breath to defend or power to protect them. If I had sons to send to College, Jorden should have been their tutor” (Piozzi). Again, “Whenever a young man becomes Jorden’s pupil he becomes his son.” Still, when Johnson’s intimate, Taylor, was about to join him at Pembroke, he persuaded him to go to Christ Church, where the lectures were excellent. In going to get Taylor’s lecture notes at second-hand, Johnson saw that his ragged shoes were noticed by the Christ Church men, and came no more. He was too proud to accept money, and, some kind hand having placed a pair of new shoes at his door, Johnson, when his short-sighted vision spied them, flung them passionately away. His room was a very small one in the second storey over the gateway; it is practically unaltered.
“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his contemporaries, that he was generally to be 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, he was delicate in language, and we all feared him.” So Edwards, an old fellow-collegian of Johnson’s, told Boswell half a century later. Johnson, hearing from Edwards that a gentleman had left his whole fortune to Pembroke, discussed the ethics of legacies to Colleges. Edwards has given us a saying we would not willingly lose: “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Johnson remembered drinking with Edwards at an alehouse near Pembroke-gate. Their meeting again, after fifty years spent by both in London, Johnson accounted one of the most curious incidents of his life.
Dr. Adams told Boswell that Johnson while at Pembroke was caressed and loved by all about him, was a gay and frolicsome fellow, and passed there the happiest part of his life. “When I mentioned to him this account he said, ‘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.’” Bishop Percy told Boswell, “The pleasure he took in vexing the tutors and fellows has been often mentioned. But I have heard him say that the mild but judicious expostulations of this worthy man [Dr. Adams, then a junior Fellow] 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.’” Johnson was transferred from Jorden to Adams, who said to Boswell, “I was his nominal tutor, but he was above my mark.” When Johnson heard this remark, his eyes flashed with satisfaction. “That was liberal and noble,” he exclaimed. Jorden once gave him for a Christmas exercise Pope’s “Messiah” to turn into Latin verse, which the veteran saw and was pleased to commend highly.
Carlyle has drawn a fancy picture of the rough, seamy-faced, rawboned servitor starving in view of the empty or locked buttery. Dr. Birkbeck Hill has shown that though Johnson was poor, he lived like other men. His batells came to about eight shillings a week. Even Mr. Leslie Stephen introduces the usual talk about “servitors and sizars.” Johnson was not a servitor. “It was the practice for a servitor, by order of the Master, to go round to the rooms of the young men, and, knocking[331] 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.’”
Any one who has occupied the narrow tower staircase can imagine the noise of Johnson’s ponderous form tumbling down it in hot pursuit. The present balusters must be the same as those he clutched in his headlong descents one hundred and sixty years ago. Amid this boisterousness he read with deep attention Law’s racy and masculine book, the Serious Call.
Dr. Hill has examined exhaustively the difficult question of the length of Johnson’s residence, and proved that the fourteen months, to which the batell books testify, was the whole of his Oxford career. He was absent for but one week in the Long Vacation of 1729. He ceased to reside in December, 1729, and removed his name from the books October 8th, 1731, without taking his degree, his caution money (£7) cancelling his undischarged batells. But, his contemporaries assure us, “he had contracted a love and regard for Pembroke College, which he retained to the last.” It has been thought that the College helped him pecuniarily. He loved it none the less that it was reputed a Jacobitical place. In his Life of Sir T. Browne he speaks of “the zeal and gratitude of those that love it.” Whenever he visited Oxford in after days he would go and see his College before doing anything else. Warton was his companion in 1754. Johnson was highly pleased to find all the College servants of his time still remaining, particularly a very old manciple, and to be recognized by them. But he was coldly received when he waited on the Master, Dr. Radcliffe, who did not ask him to dinner, and did not care to talk about the forthcoming Dictionary. However, there was a cordial meeting with his old rival Meeke, now a Fellow. At the classical lecture in hall Johnson had fretted under Meeke’s superiority, he told Warton, and tried to sit out of earshot of his construing. Besides Meeke, it seems, there was at this time only one other resident Fellow. Boswell describes other visits, when Dr. Adams, Johnson’s lifelong friend, was Master. He prided himself on being accurately academic, and wore his gown ostentatiously. The following letter from Hannah More to her sister is dated Oxford, June 13th, 1782:—
“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr. Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine with what delight he showed me every part of his own College (Pembroke), nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party. Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’ Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been of his College, ‘In short,’ said he, ‘we were a nest of singing birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’ He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he passed there. When we came into the common room we spied a fine large print of Johnson, framed and hung up that very morning, with this motto, ‘And is not Johnson ours, himself a host?’ under which stared you in the face, ‘From Miss More’s Sensibility.’ This little incident amused us; but alas! Johnson looked very ill indeed; spiritless and wan. However he made an effort to be cheerful, and I exerted myself to make him so.”
A few months before his death, his ebbing strength beginning to return, he had a wistful desire to see Oxford and Pembroke once again, and, weary as he was with the journey, revived[332] in spirit as the coach drew near the ancient city. He presented all his works to the College library, and had thoughts of bequeathing his house at Lichfield to the College, but he was reminded of the claims of some poor relatives. “He took a pleasure,” Boswell says, “in boasting of the many eminent men who had been educated at Pembroke.”
Shenstone, the poet, entered Pembroke in 1732, after Johnson had left. Burns says: “His divine Elegies do honour to our language, our nation, and our species.” Johnson writes: “Here it appears he found delight and advantage; for he continued his name in the book ten years, though he took no degree. After the first four years he put on the civilian’s gown.” Hawkins, Professor of Poetry. Rev. Richard Graves, junior, admitted scholar, November, 1732—poet and novelist. He was the author of the Spiritual Quixote, a satire on the Methodists. He tells us: “Having brought with me the character of a tolerably good Grecian, I was invited to a very sober little party, who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water. Here I continued six months, and we read over Theophrastus, Epictetus, Phalaris’ Epistles, and such other Greek authors as are seldom read at school. But I was at length seduced from this mortified symposium to a very different party, a set of jolly, sprightly young fellows, most of them West country lads, who drank ale, smoked tobacco, punned, and sang bacchanalian catches the whole evening.… I own with shame that, being then not seventeen, I was so far captivated with the social disposition of these young people (many of whom were ingenuous lads and good scholars), that I began to think them the only wise men. Some gentlemen commoners, however, who considered the above-mentioned a very low company (chiefly on account of the liquor they drank), good-naturedly invited me to their party; they treated me with port wine and arrack punch; and now and then, when they had drunk so much as hardly to distinguish wine from water, they would conclude with a bottle or two of claret. They kept late hours, drank their favourite toasts on their knees, and in short were what were then called ‘bucks of the first head.’ … There was, besides, a sort of flying squadron of plain, sensible, matter-of-fact men, confined to no club, but associating with each party. They anxiously inquired after the news of the day and the politics of the times. They had come to the University on their way to the Temple, or to get a slight smattering of the sciences before they settled in the country.” Graves breakfasts with Shenstone (who wore his own hair), a Mr. Whistler being of the company. This was “a young man of great delicacy of sentiment, but with such a dislike to languages that he is unable to read the classics in the original, yet no one formed a better judgment of them. He wrote, moreover, a great part of a tragedy on the story of Dido.” In a later day we may surmise this young gentleman of delicacy of sentiment would have written a Newdigate. The three friends often met and discussed plays and poetry, Spectators or Tatlers.