Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/233

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
197

certain wild and irreverent set of his fellow-students. On his arrival he passed one morning, as was the custom, in the chambers of his Tutor, whom he decided to be "no scholar"; and he went no more. The next time he met his Tutor on the street he treated his Tutor very rudely, an act of which he boasted in his later years. He cheerfully paid a fine of two pence for non-attendance at a lecture, which he said, openly, was not worth a penny! He was, according to Bishop Percy, "generally to be seen lounging at the College gate, with a circle of young students around him, whom he was entertaining with his wit and keeping from their studies. But he would never let any of them say 'Prodigious,' or otherwise misuse the English language in any way." He denied, in after days, that he was gay and frivolous at that time. "I was mad and violent, Sir! 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."

Other men, without knowing it, no doubt, are still fighting the same hard battle, on college campuses, in the same unsatisfactory manner.

Johnson's room, says Dr. Maclane, "was a very small one, in the second story, over the Gateway; and now [1891] practically unaltered. Anyone