esiastical court of the diocese, who used to invite Johnson and another younger Lichfield lad, the lively David Garrick, to dine with him and who encouraged Johnson's intellectual interests. Two years later a small legacy from a relation of Mrs. Johnson's enabled Samuel to enroll in Oxford University, where many of his less brilliant but more affluent schoolmates had already gone. When he entered Pembroke College, the breadth of the young man's reading is said to have made an impression on the dons. But the thirteen months he spent there before the money ran out were hardly successful ones. He found his tutors incompetent, and instead of attending lectures spent his time in such amusements as sliding on the ice and encouraging his fellow undergraduates in rebellious indiscipline. "I was rude and violent," he later said. "It was bitterness which they mistook for frolic. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by my literature and wit." Nevertheless it was at Oxford that he composed his first published work, a translation into Latin verse of Pope's long poem Messiah that appeared in a collection edited by an Oxford don (1731). Pope said it was so well done that it would be hard to tell whether his or the anonymous translator's was the original--a great compliment from the greatest poet of his time. Leaving without a degree, Johnson returned to Lichfield for another two years, doing just what, no one knows--probably reading further in the bookshop and quarreling with the rest of his uncongenial family. Michael died in 1731, and presumably Samuel was told that he no longer need expect to be s...
