There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons. There is little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson’s life at Pembroke. He went up in the October term of 1728, being then nineteen years of age, and already full of that wide and miscellaneous classical reading which the Oxford course, then as now, somewhat discouraged. ‘His figure and manner appeared strange’ to the company in which he found himself; and when he broke silence it was with a quotation from Macrobius. To his tutor’s lectures, as a later poet says, ‘with freshman zeal he went’; but his zeal did not last out the discovery that the tutor was ‘a heavy man,’ and the fact that there was ‘sliding on Christ Church Meadow.’ Have any of the artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in the Doctor’s life—drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even the exercise of skating could not have made ‘swan-like,’ to quote the young lady in ‘Pickwick’? Johnson was ‘sconced’ in the sum of twopence for cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the amount of the fine was the same four hundred years earlier, when Master Stoke, of Catte Hall (whose career we touched on in the second of these sketches), deserted his lessons. It was when he was thus sconced that Johnson made that reply which Boswell preserves ‘as a specimen of the antithetical character of his wit’—‘Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance on a lecture not worth a penny.’ Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in degree. ‘A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some discontent, cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his College sent his servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five shillings; and,’ says the Doctor, ‘tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I’ll sconce him ten!’ This prosaic punishment might perhaps deter some Werthers from playing with edged tools.