consorted with men who treated him to arrack punch—and who did not even pun! Graves used to breakfast with Shenstone, who, he tells us, "wore his own hair." He and Whitfield received together, in 1736, their degrees of B. A.
George Whitfield, also entering in 1732, and a Servitor, had a hard time at college. The Master was harsh to him, and he underwent daily some contempt from the students, a few of whom threw dirt at him on the streets. And there was plenty of dirt in the streets ! Boswell reports Johnson as claiming to have been at Pembroke with Whitfield "before Whitfield began to be better than other people." But they were probably not in residence there together. And Johnson was hardly one of the throwers of dirt.
Whitfield does not seem to have belonged to the set of Shenstone and Graves. Very early in his college career he became attached to the Wesleys, and to their methods; he was conspicuous, even in the Oxford of those days, for the austerity of his asceticism, and for his enthusiasm and zeal in his labors for the care of the sick, the poor, and the imprisoned.
Blackstone was a contemporary of Shenstone and of his poetical friends at Pembroke, although a year or two their junior. Whether poetry was then his natural bent, or whether he was inspired by the
