"His father, who had anxiously accompanied him, found means to have him introduced to Mr Jorden, who was to be his tutor.... His father seemed very full of the merits of his son, and told the company he was a good scholar, and a poet, and wrote Latin verses. His figure and manner appeared strange to them; but he behaved modestly, and sat silent, till upon something which occurred in the course of conversation, he suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius; and thus he gave the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself." Johnson had no great opinion of Mr Jorden as a scholar: "He was a very worthy man, but a heavy man, and I did not profit much by his instructions. Indeed, I did not attend him much. The first day after I came to college I waited upon him, and then stayed away four. On the sixth, Mr Jorden asked me why I had not attended. I answered I had been sliding in Christ Church meadow. And this I said with as much _nonchalance_ as I am now talking to you. I had no notion I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor." Johnson's rooms were on the second floor over the gateway of Pembroke College. The tower itself has been much altered, but the visitor to Oxford can see the rooms pretty much as they were in Johnson's day. Elsewhere in the college he may examine (or "contemplate with veneration," as Boswell would have done) many Johnsonian relics--his writing-desk and tea-pot among them. From what we already know of Johnson's boyhood, we cannot picture him as a lively undergraduate; for poverty and ill-health make it difficult for a young man to enjoy life with his fellows, and Johnson suffered from both. A schoolfellow of Johnson, named Taylor, had come up to Christ Church, where one of the tutors, Mr Bateman, had a high reputation: "Mr Bateman's lectures were so excellent, that Johnson used to come and get them at second-hand from Taylor, till his poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away with indignation." "How must we feel" adds the faithful Boswell "when we read such an anecdote of Samuel Johnson!" Nor had his health improved. Here is an account of him at the end of his first year at Oxford: "While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with ... perpetual irritation, fretfulness and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery. From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved ... he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock."