at Pembroke. He went up in the October term of 1728, being then
nineteen years of age, and already full of that wide and
miscellaneous classical reading which the Oxford course, then as now,
somewhat discouraged. "His figure and manner appeared strange" to
the company in which he found himself; and when he broke silence it
was with a quotation from Macrobius. To his tutor's lectures, as a
later poet says, "with freshman zeal he went"; but his zeal did not
last out the discovery that the tutor was "a heavy man," and the fact
that there was "sliding on Christ Church Meadow." Have any of the
artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in the
Doctor's life--drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in
these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even
the exercise of skating could not have made "swan-like," to quote the
young lady in "Pickwick"? Johnson was "sconced" in the sum of
twopence for cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the
amount of the fine was the same four hundred years earlier, when
Master Stoke, of Catte Hall (whose career we touched on in the second
of these sketches), deserted his lessons. It was when he was thus
sconced that Johnson made that reply which Boswell preserves "as a
specimen of the antithetical character of his wit"--"Sir, you have
sconced me twopence for non-attendance on a lecture not worth a
penny."

Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in
degree. "A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some
discontent, cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his
College sent his servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five
shillings; and," says the Doctor, "tell him that the next time he
cuts his throat I'll sconce him ten!" This prosaic punishment might
perhaps deter some Werthers from playing with edged tools.