which sometimes drove him to the borders of insanity. At Oxford, Law's
_Serious Call_ gave him the strong religious impressions which remained
through life. But he does not seem to have been regarded as a gloomy or
a religious youth by his contemporaries. When told in after years that
he had been described as a "gay and frolicsome fellow," he replied, "Ah!
sir, I was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for
frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my
literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all authority."
Though a hearty supporter of authority in principle, Johnson was
distinguished through life by the strongest spirit of personal
independence and self-respect. He held, too, the sound doctrine,
deplored by his respectable biographer Hawkins, that the scholar's life,
like the Christian's, levelled all distinctions of rank. When an
officious benefactor put a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them
away with indignation. He seems to have treated his tutors with a
contempt which Boswell politely attributed to "great fortitude of mind,"
but Johnson himself set down as "stark insensibility." The life of a
poor student is not, one may fear, even yet exempt from much bitterness,
and in those days the position was far more servile than at present. The
servitors and sizars had much to bear from richer companions. A proud
melancholy lad, conscious of great powers, had to meet with hard
rebuffs, and tried to meet them by returning scorn for scorn.

Such distresses, however, did not shake Johnson's rooted Toryism. He
fully imbibed, if he did not already share, the strongest prejudices of
the place, and his misery never produced a revolt against the system,
though it may have fostered insolence to individuals. Three of the most
eminent men with whom Johnson came in contact in later life, had also
been students at Oxford. Wesley, his senior by six years, was a fellow
of Lincoln whilst Johnson was an undergraduate, and was learning at