months of studious maturity he felt himself as unworthy of them. But when one looks at them now, one cannot help fancying that he felt that they were unworthy of him. The sitting-room, with a window looking out on to St. Aldate's Church, is small enough; but the bed-room, with a bit of a window from which can be gained a glimpse of the Quadrangle, is the smallest, packing-box example of a bed-room in which a full-grown, overgrown college, lad was ever placed. In these chambers nothing that Johnson knew but the walls (newly papered), and the ceiling (newly whitewashed), and the floors (newly carpeted), are now left. And a story above Johnson's rooms has been added to the Tower since Johnson's time.
His portrait hangs, in an indifferent light, over the mantel in the Senior Common Room. It is claimed for it that it is an original, or a replica, by Sir Joshua Reynolds; and that it was painted for Bennet Langton. But in 1899 it was carefully examined by Mr. Charles F. Bell, Assistant Keeper of the Ashmolean, and an authority upon the subject, who writes, in a personal note, that as it was not Langton's, and as it does not appear in any of the earlier records of Reynolds's work, he considers it to be, most probably, an old copy, made, perhaps, in Reynolds's studio, by one of the Master's many followers.
