There are difficulties in determining the circumstances and duration of Johnson’s stay at Oxford.  He began residence at Pembroke College in 1728.  It seems probable that he received some assistance from a gentleman whose son took him as companion, and from the clergy of Lichfield, to whom his father was known, and who were aware of the son’s talents.  Possibly his college assisted him during part of the time.  It is certain that he left without taking a degree, though he probably resided for nearly three years.  It is certain, also, that his father’s bankruptcy made his stay difficult, and that the period must have been one of trial.

The effect of the Oxford residence upon Johnson’s mind was characteristic.  The lad already suffered from the attacks of melancholy, which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity.  At Oxford, Law’s Serious Call gave him the strong religious impressions which remained through life.  But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or a religious youth by his contemporaries.  When told in after years that he had been described as a “gay and frolicsome fellow,” he replied, “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.”  Though a hearty supporter of authority in principle, Johnson was distinguished through life by the strongest spirit of personal independence and self-respect.  He held, too, the sound doctrine, deplored by his respectable biographer Hawkins, that the scholar’s life, like the Christian’s, levelled all distinctions of rank.  When an officious benefactor put a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation.  He seems to have treated his tutors with a contempt which Boswell politely attributed to “great fortitude of mind,” but Johnson himself set down as “stark insensibility.”  The life of a poor student is not, one may fear, even yet exempt from much bitterness, and in those days the position was far more servile than at present.  The servitors and sizars had much to bear from richer companions.  A proud melancholy lad, conscious of great powers, had to meet with hard rebuffs, and tried to meet them by returning scorn for scorn.

Such distresses, however, did not shake Johnson’s rooted Toryism.  He fully imbibed, if he did not already share, the strongest prejudices of the place, and his misery never produced a revolt against the system, though it may have fostered insolence to individuals.  Three of the most eminent men with whom Johnson came in contact in later life, had also been students at Oxford.  Wesley, his senior by six years, was a fellow of Lincoln whilst Johnson was an undergraduate, and was learning at Oxford the necessity of rousing his countrymen from the religious lethargy into which they had sunk.  “Have not pride and haughtiness of spirit, impatience, and peevishness, sloth and