Bennet Langton, born in 1741 in the very neighborhood famous now as the birthplace of Tennyson, was the elder son of the odd and long-descended George Langton of Langton, and of Diana his wife, daughter of Edmund Turnor, Esquire, of Stoke Rochford, Lincolnshire. While a lad in the fen-country, he read _The Rambler_, and conceived the purest enthusiasm for its author. He came to London, indeed, on the ideal errand of seeking him out, and, thanks to the kind apothecary Levett, found the idol of his imagination at home at No. 17 Gough Square, Fleet Street. Despite the somewhat staggering circumstances of Johnson’s attire,—for the serious boy had rashly presupposed a stately, fastidious, and well-mannered figure,—he paid his vows, and commended himself to his new friend for once and all. Langton entered Trinity College, Oxford, in 1757, at the age of sixteen.[46] The Doctor, who had known him about three years, followed his career at the university with interest, writing to Langton’s tutor, then “dear Tom Warton,” just appointed to the professorship of poetry held by his father, and afterwards poet-laureate: “I see your pupil: his mind is as exalted as his stature,” and to Langton’s self the sweet generality: “I love, dear sir, to think of you.” He even paid his Freshman a visit, and swam sportively across a dangerous pool in the Isis, in the teeth of his warning; and here also, in the Oxford which was long ago his own “tent of a night,” he fell across a part of his destiny in the shape of that strange bird, Mr. Topham Beauclerk, then a taking scapegrace of eighteen. The Doctor must have shaken his head at first, and wondered at the juxtaposition of this arrant Lord of Misrule and the “evangelical goodness” of his admirable Langton, until mollified by the knowledge that a species of cult for himself, and ardent perusal of his writings, had first brought them together. It was a pleasant thought to him, that of the two young ribboned heads high in the quadrangle, bending for the ninth time over _The Reasons Why Advice is Generally Ineffectual_, _The Mischief of Unbounded Raillery_, and the jolly satire on _Screech-Owls_; or smiling over the shy Verecundulus and the too-celebrated Misellus who were part of the author’s machinery for adding “Christian ardor to virtue, and Christian confidence to truth.”