country lying between them; but to have known almost nothing else in a topographical way.
The work with which, to the great mass of Biblical students, his name is now associated, "The Commentary on the Psalms," was done in the room of the President of Magdalen, where John- son and Boswell visited him, in 1776, when Johnson drank innumerable cups of tea, and pronounced himself as being very much impressed by his host.
Edward Gibbon says: "I was matriculated in the University as a Gentleman Commoner [in 1752] before I had accomplished the fifteenth year of my age. ... I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy would have been ashamed. . . . My apartments [in Magdalen] consisted of three elegant and well furnished rooms, in the New Building, a stately pile." It is still called New Building, although it was twenty years old when Gibbon saw it first.
The connection between Gibbon and Magdalen was not long, nor was it profitable, either to college or to collegian; and no son of Oxford has ever spoken so disrespectfully, or so bitterly, of his Alma Mater. The future historian, as he has told us, was but a lad when he entered Magdalen, in
