celebrity which is already of the past. Those who care to search
among the embers of that once brilliant reputation can form a
fair notion of what Samuel Johnson would have been if he had
lived a generation later, and had been absolved from the
necessity of earning his bread by the enjoyment of ecclesiastical
sinecures, and from any uneasiness as to his worldly standing by
the possession of academical dignities and functions. The Dean
who had boundless goodwill for all his fellow-creatures at every
period of life, provided that they were not Jacobins or sceptics,
recognised the promise of the boy, and entertained him at his
college residence on terms of friendliness, and almost of
equality. After one of these visits he writes to Mr. Macaulay;
"Your lad is a fine fellow. He shall stand before kings, he shall
not stand before mean men."

Shelford: February 22, 1813.

My dear Papa,--As this is a whole holiday, I cannot find a better
time for answering your letter. With respect to my health, I am
very well, and tolerably cheerful, as Blundell, the best and most
clever of all the scholars, is very kind, and talks to me, and
takes my part. He is quite a friend of Mr. Preston's. The other
boys, especially Lyon, a Scotch boy, and Wilberforce, are very
good-natured, and we might have gone on very well had not one,
a Bristol fellow, come here. He is unanimously alloyed to be a
queer fellow, and is generally characterised as a foolish boy,
and by most of us as an ill-natured one. In my learning I do
Xenophon every day, and twice a week the Odyssey, in which I am
classed with Wilberforce, whom all the boys allow to be very
clever, very droll, and very impudent. We do Latin verses trice a