From Boswell’s meagre account of Johnson’s Oxford career we gather some facts which supplement the description of Gibbon. The future historian went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson departed without taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased. He ‘eloped,’ as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of ‘the Manly Oxonian in London.’ The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to £30,000, took no interest in their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a style of dry and literal translation. The other fellows, less conscientious, passed their lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the ‘Oxford Toasts,’ and drinking other toasts to the king over the water. ‘Some duties,’ says Gibbon, ‘may possibly have been imposed on the poor scholars,’ but ‘the velvet cap was the cap of liberty,’ and the gentleman commoner consulted only his own pleasure. Johnson was a poor scholar, and on him duties were imposed. He was requested to write an ode on the Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks ‘his vivacity and imagination must have produced something fine.’ He neglected, however, with his usual indolence, this opportunity of producing something fine. Another exercise imposed on the poor was the translation of Mr. Pope’s ‘Messiah,’ in which the young Pembroke man succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope’s own generous confession, future ages would doubt whether the English or the Latin piece was the original. Johnson complained that no man could be properly inspired by the Pembroke ‘coll,’ or college beer, which was then commonly drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of collecting Chinese monsters. _Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetæ_ _Ingenium jubeas purior baustus alat_. In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the ‘bitterness mistaken for frolic,’ with which Johnson entertained the other undergraduates round Pembroke gate, he never ceased to respect his college. ‘His love and regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last,’ while of his old tutor he said, ‘a man who becomes Jorden’s pupil becomes his son.’ Gibbon’s sneer is a foil to Johnson’s kindliness. ‘I applaud the filial piety which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.’