Anecdotes by George Steevens.
��my purpose ; for it convinced those who were well enough inclined to punish me, that I could wield a scholar's weapon as often as I was menaced with arbitrary inflictions. Before the frequency of personal satire had weakened its effect, the petty Tyrants of Colleges 1 stood in awe of a pointed remark, or a vindictive epigram. But since every man in his turn has been wounded, no man is ashamed of a scar.'
I wrote (said Johnson) the first seventy lines in the Vanity of Human Wishes in the course of one morning, in that small house beyond the church [at Hampstead] 2. The whole number was
�� ��1 At the end of the Pembroke buttery-book of Johnson's time I found scribbled, probably by a servitor: 'Nothing is so imperious as a Fellow of a college upon his own dunghill, nothing so contemptible abroad.'
Bentham entered Queen's College, Oxford, at the age of twelve. 'His tutor was a morose and gloomy personage, sour and repulsive a sort of Protestant monk. His only anxiety about his pupil was to prevent his having any amusement.' Bentham's Works, x. 37.
John James, who was at Queen's College in 1778, writing of those on the Foundation says : * The more I see of it, the more do I felicitate myself that I did not enter upon it. I could not bear to be so brow beaten.' 'There is,' he says, 'such an uncharitableness in the manners of a college, such an unsociable reserve, and disregard of each other's welfare, that I never can think of them without growing out of humour with all about me.' Letters of Radcliffe and James, pp. 56, 85.
Vicesimus Knox wrote in 1781:
- The principal thing required is
external respect from the juniors. However ignorant or unworthy a senior fellow may be, yet the slightest
��disrespect is treated as the greatest crime of which an academic can be guilty.' Knox's Works, iv. 201.
The gentlemen -commoners, to judge from Gibbon's account, were not exposed to any of this tyranny. The servitors suffered from it most. The commoners, among whom was Johnson, would have had less to feel.
An undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, of Bentley's time, in his Imitation of an Ode of Horace (iii. 2), says of the student:
'With want and rigid College laws Let him inur'd betimes comply.* Monk's Bentley, ii. 173.
2 'Mrs. Johnson, for the sake of country air, had lodgings at Hampstead, to which he resorted occasionally, and there the greatest part,' if not the whole, of this Imitation was written.' Life, i. 192. 'I wrote (he said) a hundred lines of it in a day.' Ib. ii. 15.
'Park says the house at which Johnson used to lodge was the last house in Frognal, southward, occupied in Park's time by'B. C. Stephenson, E sq.' Hewitt' s Northern Heights of London, ed. 1869, p. 243.
Steevens lived at Hampstead. By enclosing 'at Hampstead' in brackets composed
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