From Boswell's meagre account of Johnson's Oxford career we gather
some facts which supplement the description of Gibbon. The future
historian went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson
departed without taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner,
and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just
as he pleased. He "eloped," as he says, from Oxford, as often as he
chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of
"the Manly Oxonian in London." The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a
revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to 30,000
pounds, took no interest in their pupils. Gibbon's tutor read a few
Latin plays with his pupil, in a style of dry and literal
translation. The other fellows, less conscientious, passed their
lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the "Oxford Toasts," and
drinking other toasts to the king over the water. "Some duties,"
says Gibbon, "may possibly have been imposed on the poor scholars,"
but "the velvet cap was the cap of liberty," and the gentleman
commoner consulted only his own pleasure. Johnson was a poor
scholar, and on him duties were imposed. He was requested to write
an ode on the Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks "his vivacity and
imagination must have produced something fine." He neglected,
however, with his usual indolence, this opportunity of producing
something fine. Another exercise imposed on the poor was the
translation of Mr. Pope's "Messiah," in which the young Pembroke man
succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope's own generous confession, future
ages would doubt whether the English or the Latin piece was the
original. Johnson complained that no man could be properly inspired
by the Pembroke "coll," or college beer, which was then commonly
drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of
collecting Chinese monsters.