I must not forget to express my grateful acknowledgments to the Editors and Proprietors of 'The Cornhill Magazine,' 'The Pall Mall Gazette,' 'The Saturday Review,' and 'The Times,' for the permission they have kindly given me to use in this volume my various contributions to their papers.

GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL.

THE POPLARS, Burghfield;

May 28, 1878.

DR. JOHNSON:

HIS FRIENDS AND HIS CRITICS.

CHAPTER I.

OXFORD IN JOHNSON'S TIME.

THE Oxford of last century is with most readers the Oxford not of Johnson, but of Gibbon. They call to mind the just indignation which the great historian felt in his riper years against that University where he spent the most idle and unprofitable fourteen months of his whole life. To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation,' he wrote, 'and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.' It is but a few pages that he gives to this mother whom he thus renounces, but his description is so lively, his satire so pointed, and his scorn so marked, that it is the sketch that he thus paints that remains fixed in our minds as the very picture of Oxford herself.

We call to mind the lad in his fifteenth year suddenly raised from a boy to a man; his decent allowance of money; the indefinite and dangerous latitude of credit that he could command; his velvet cap and silk gown which distinguished him as a gentleman-commoner from an ordinary student; the key which was delivered into his hands, which gave him the free use of a numerous and learned library; his three elegant and well-furnished rooms in the new building—a stately pile, as he calls it -of Magdalen College; his first tutor-one of the best of the tribe-who proposed to read with him one hour every day, and who, with a smile, accepted- his first apology for his omission to attend, and encouraged him to repeat the offence with less ceremony; his second tutor, who well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform, who never summoned him to attend even the ceremony of a lecture; his growing debts; the tour he made to Bath, the visit to Buckinghamshire, and the four excursions to London, as if he had been an independent stranger in a hired lodging, without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once feeling the hand of control; his first appearance before the Vice-Chancellor, who said that he was not old enough as yet to sign the Thirty-nine Articles, but, directing him to return when he