weekly, yet they occur, if not at regular, yet at frequent intervals throughout that period. A celebrated writer is greatly exercised with the question, how JOHNSON was in residence and subsisted for a week on five penny worth of Battels, and during the two following weeks was not charged for anything. His answer is that either a friend or the college supplied or paid for his rations. This we think is inconsistent with JOHNSON'S well known independent spirit, and venture to think that JOHNSON's poverty compelled him to the exceptional method of catering for his own larder.

His three years' residence is further confirmed by the deep interest which in after years he took in his college. He always spoke of it with

rapturous fondness.

When Miss Hannah More and JOHNSON visited Oxford, she says that after dinner with the Master of Pembroke, “he begged to conduct me to see the College;" he would let no one show me but himself. "This was my room; this Shenstone's." Then after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who had been of his college, "In short," said he,

we were a nest of singing birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket." Now it is hardly possible that JOHNSON could have formed such an ardent attachment to his college by a residence there of only fourteen months.

In 1772 we see how deeply interested Boswell himself was as to the length of JOHNSON'S residence at Oxford. We hear him interrogating JOHNSON as to "when he came to Oxford." It is not at all likely that Boswell, the Prince of Interviewers, would be foiled in his endeavour to get this information which he deemed so important; and when he asked when he began residence in Oxford, he would also ask when he left it.

From these considerations, we venture to think that Boswell and Hawkins are right, and that Croker and others are entirely in the wrong, when they assert that he was there little longer than a year.

During the latter part of his college career JOHNSON was in deep poverty. One can never recollect "the story of the shoes" without deep emotion. One day a generous hearted student—

would that we knew his name-had with pity seen in the college quadrangle JOHNSON'S tattered shoes, with his naked toes, like their young master, impatient of control and asserting their liberty. Next morning kindness, if not considerateness, had placed a new pair at his room door, which JOHNSON finding, took up with indignation, and flung away. By that act what a lesson he read to the world of sturdy independence! He prefers his own ragged shoes to the presented shoes of another man, no matter how fine soever they may be. The same year that he left Oxford his father died, and he was thrown upon the world to shift for himself, with only twenty pounds of patrimony. His was a hard struggle for existence, but through it all he maintained a noble spirit of independence. His own words near the close of his life were: "No man who ever lived by literature has lived more independently than I have done.” These words are true. Regarding the disorder of his father's affairs at this time, a deeply affecting story was told by himself when on a visit to his birthplace, after he became the great literary dictator. One

morning he was missed from the breakfast table. The day passed without the return of the illustrious guest; just as supper was announced the door opened, and the Doctor entered; a brief but solemn silence ensued, no one daring to ask the cause of his absence, when he thus addressed the lady of the house: " "Madam, I beg your pardon for the abruptness of my departure from your house this. morning, but I was constrained to it by my conscience. Fifty years ago, madam, on this day, I committed a breach of filial piety, which has ever since lain heavy on my mind, and has not till this day been expiated. My father had been in the habit of attending Uttoxeter market, and opening a stall there for the sale of his books. Confined by indisposition, he desired me that day to go and attend the stall in his place. My pride prevented me; I gave my father a refusal. And now to-day I have been at Uttoxeter; I went into the market at the time of high business, uncovered my head, and stood with it bare for an hour, on the spot where my father's stall used to stand. In contrition Į stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory."

Brave old Philosopher! Beautiful, sentimental superstition, over which we weep; but alas! alas! no regrets can avail to alter the results of the past; and the logic of stern fact exhorts us never to repent, except in the sense of learning wisdom by experience.

At the age of twenty-six, being poor and miserable, he married. He began by courting Miss Lucy Porter, and ended by marrying her mother.

Of Mrs. Johnson we know but little, except what is told us by Garrick, who speaks of her as a vain, conceited person, full of affectation, who reddened her cheeks by paints and cordials; but surely, as JOHNSON himself would say, it was better that she should be "reddening her own cheeks than blackening other people's characters." Not only was she vain and conceited, but, according to Garrick, positively ugly; yet JOHNSON loved her, and called her fondly his "dear Tetty." Had Garrick forgotten that there is no perfect standard of beauty? or that at certain angles, to artistic minds, ugliness itself is positively beautiful? or that JOHNSON might imagine that beauty was in the mind,