s of a dream, and who built his hopes of
fame upon that "Africa" which the world has been willing to forget,
found the reader he would have welcomed and the student he would have
cherished in the ungainly youth who pored over him in a garret. The
boy Johnson, bent over the great folio, forgot that he was poor, forgot
that he was ill-clad, under the spell of the stately lines that their
poet believed to be not less than Virgilian. He had set out on an
errand even more trivial than that of Saul the son of Kish, and he had
found the illimitable kingdom of dreams.

[Sidenote: 1728--The college days of Dr. Johnson]

Chance sent the student of Petrarch to Pembroke College, Oxford, where
he passed two years eating the bitter bread of poverty in the bitter
pride of youth. He was hungry, he was ragged, he was conscious of his
great knowledge and his great gifts, and he saw all around him men in
high places whose attainments he despised, and men seeking the same
goal as himself whose happy ease of circumstances he affected to
disdain and was compelled to envy. His wild soul rose in rebellion at
the inequalities of life. He passed for a mutineer.

His college days were bitter and rebellious; days of hunger and thirst
and ruined raiment. Some well-meaning person, moved to pity by the
sight of Johnson's shabby shoes, patched and mended till they were past
all wholesome cobbling, placed a new sound pair at Johnson's door in
nameless benevolence. Johnson cast them from him with fury, too proud
to be shod by another man's bounty. He drifted through his few and
gloomy college days deriding and despising those in authority;
seemingly wasting his time and yet not wasting it; translating Pope's
"Messiah" into such noble Latin that Pope, moved by honest admiration,
declared that future times would be unable to tell which was the
original and which was the translation. Johnson could be nowhere
without learning, and he learned something at Oxford; but in any case
his stay was short, and he drifted back to Lichfield, leaving on the
{42} banks of the Isis an amazing memory of a sullen savage creature,
brimmed with the strangest miscellaneous learning. In Lichfield his
father's death, following hard upon his return from Oxford, left him
lonelier and poorer than ever, troubled by the grim necessity to be
fed, clothed, and sheltered, and by the uncertainty how to set about
it. He did set about it, earnestly, strenuously, if not very