worth, who "taught him a great deal." There
he remained twelve months, at the close of which he returned home, and
for two years lived in his father's house, in comparative idleness,
loitering in the fields, and reading much, but desultorily. In 1728,
being flattered with some promises of aid from a Shropshire gentleman,
named Corbet, which were never fulfilled, he went to Oxford, and was
entered as a commoner in Pembroke College. His father accompanied and
introduced him to Dr Adams, and to Jorden, who became his tutor,
recommending his son as a good scholar and a poet. Under Jorden's
care, however, he did little except translate Pope's "Messiah" into
Latin verse,--a task which he performed with great rapidity, and so
well, that Pope warmly commended it when he saw it printed in a
miscellany of poems. About this time, the hypochondriac affection,
which rendered Johnson's long life a long disease, began to manifest
itself. In the vacation of 1729, he was seized with the darkest
despondency, which he tried to alleviate by violent exercise and other
means, but in vain. It seems to have left him during a fit of
indignation at Dr Swinfen (a physician at Lichfield, who, struck by
the elegant Latinity of an account of his malady, which the sufferer
had put into his hands, showed it in all directions), but continued to
recur at frequent intervals till the close of his life. His malady was
undoubtedly of a maniacal cast, resembling Cowper's, but subdued by
superior strength of will--a Bucephalus, which it required all the
power of a Johnson to back and bridle. In his early days, he had been
piously inclined, but after his ninth year, fell into a state of
indifference to religion. This continued till he met, at Oxford, Law's
"Serious Call," which, he says, "overmatched" and compelled him to
consider the subject with earnestness. And whatever, in after years,
were the errors of his life, he never, from that hour, ceased to have
a solemn sense of the verities of the Christian religion.

At Oxford, he paid little attention to his regular tasks, but read, or
rather devoured, all the books he could lay his hands on, and began to
display his unrivalled conversational powers, being often seen
"lounging about the college gates, with a circle of young students
around him, whom he was entertaining with wit, keeping from their
studies, and sometimes rousing to rebellion against the college
discipline." He was, at this time, so miserably po