His faculty for poetical and prose writings was already strongly developed when first he came up to Oxford, and the original points of view from which he wrote his themes were a subject of great comment. The rest of the Undergraduates were as children when compared to one of his mental abilities. Even his tutor admitted that his position was farcical, and that Johnson was far above him in brain capacity, for he said on one occasion that “I was his nominal tutor but he was above my mark.” And the lad was then but some nineteen years of age! Merely to perform college exercises was absurd and irritating to one of his hasty dispositions. Having rattled them off, he used to read by himself, but with such a varied and impetuous taste that his knowledge seemed to include every subject of which anything had ever been written. Boswell says that “he told me, that from his earliest years he loved to read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end; that he read Shakespeare at a period so early, that the speech of the ghost in _Hamlet_ terrified him when he was alone; that _Horace’s Odes_ were the composition in which he took most delight, and it was not long before he liked his _Epistles_ and _Satires_.... What he read most solidly at Oxford was Greek; not the Grecian historians, but Homer and Euripides, and now and then a little epigram; that the study of which he was most fond was Metaphysicks.” But for all his brilliance Johnson went down without taking a degree. His father’s death rendered it impossible for him to remain at Oxford for the full course, and he never went in for the schools. While at the university he did not form many great friendships. His was not the temperament. A highly sensitive man, surrounded for the most part by men of some wealth who were ever ready to incur expenses, he was always on the look-out for an objectionable glance of pity or sympathy, than which there was to him nothing worse or more heinous. With his wonderful talents it was rather for him to look down upon the vacuous moneyed men than permit himself to be patronised by them. Consequently, fully realising the almost insurmountable handicap of comparative penury, Johnson preferred to make his way by force of brain power or not at all, rather than bow down to the man with a fat purse. As he himself said in after life, “I thought to fight my way by my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all authority.”