pick out the truth concerning her past social condition from the
satires and the encomiums. Nor is it easy to say what qualities in
Oxford, and what answering characteristics in any of her sons, will
beget the favourable or the unfavourable verdict. Gibbon, one might
have thought, saw the sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of the
University. With youth, and wealth, and liberty, with a set of three
beautiful rooms in that "stately pile, the new building of Magdalen
College," Gibbon found nothing in Oxford to please him--nothing to
admire, nothing to love. From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke
Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson--rugged, anxious, and conscious
of his great unemployed power--looked down on a much more pleasant
Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased to regard with
affection. This contrast is found in the opinions of our
contemporaries. One man will pass his time in sneering at his tutors
and his companions, in turning listlessly from study to study, in
following false tendencies, and picking up scraps of knowledge which
he despises, and in later life he will detest his University. There
are wiser and more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge
against the stately mother of us all, that so easily can disregard
our petty spleens and ungrateful rancour. Mr. Lowe's most bitter
congratulatory addresses to the "happy Civil Engineers," and his
unkindest cuts at ancient history, and at the old philosophies which
"on Argive heights divinely sung," move her not at all. Meanwhile,
the majority of men are more kindly compact, and have more natural
affections, and on them the memory of their earliest friendships, and
of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave to their years of
youth, is not wholly wasted.

There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons.
There is little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson's life