Page:Johnsonian Miscellanies II.djvu/96

 88 Extracts from

��a word, passages from favourite authors, of three or four octavo pages in length 1. (Page 16.)

He could not, at this early period of his life, divest himself of an opinion, that poverty was disgraceful ; and was very severe in his censures of ceconomy in both our universities, which exacted at meals the attendance of poor scholars, under the several de nominations of servitors in the one, and sizers in the other 2 : he thought that the scholar's, like the Christian life, levelled all distinctions of rank and worldly pre-eminence. (Page 18.)

Upon his leaving the university, he went home to the house of his father, which he found so nearly filled with his relations, that is to say, the maiden sisters of his mother and cousin Cornelius Ford, whom his father, on the decease of their brother in the summer of 1731 3, had taken in to board, that it would scarce receive him. (Page 19.)

Cave was so incompetent a judge of Johnson's abilities, that, meaning at one time to dazzle him with the splendour of some of those luminaries in literature who favoured him with their correspondence, he told him that, if he would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse in the neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, he might have a chance of seeing Mr. Browne 4 and another or two of the persons mentioned in the preceding note: Johnson

1 Life, \. 39, 48. aulay's great uncle, ' he gave an ao Lockhart gives the following in- count of the education at Oxford in

stance of Scott's memory. 'Lord all its gradations. The advantage of

Corehouse repeating a phrase, re- being a servitor to a youth of little

markable only for its absurdity, from fortune struck Mrs. Macaulay much.'

a Magazine poem of the very silliest Life, v. 122.

feebleness, which they had laughed 3 Nathaniel Ford died in 1731 ;

at when at College together [nearly Cornelius Ford in 1734. Notes and

forty years earlier,] Scott began at Queries, 5th S. xiii. 250. Johnson

the beginning, and gave it us to the left Oxford in 1729.

end, with apparently no more effort 4 Moses Browne, ' originally a pen-

than if he himself had composed it cutter, was, so far as concerned the

the day before.' Lockhart's Scott, poetical part of it, the chief support

ed. 1839, vii. 194. of the Gentleman's Magazine, which

2 Servitors in Oxford, sizars in he fed with many a nourishing Cambridge. In the manse at Calder, morsel.' Hawkins, p. 46 n. where Johnson visited Lord Mac- He became a clergyman and was

accepted

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