His tutor, Mr. Jorden, fellow of Pembroke, was not, it seems, a man of such abilities as we should conceive requisite for the instructor of Samuel Johnson, who gave me the following account of him.  ’He was a very worthy man, but a heavy man, and I did not profit much by his instructions.  Indeed, I did not attend him much.  The first day after I came to college I waited upon him, and then staid away four.  On the sixth, Mr. Jorden asked me why I had not attended.  I answered I had been sliding in Christ-Church meadow.  And this I said with as much nonchalance as I am now talking to you.  I had no notion that I was wrong or irreverent to my tutor.  Boswell:  ’That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.’  Johnson:  ‘No, Sir; stark insensibility.’

He had a love and respect for Jorden, not for his literature, but for his worth.  ’Whenever (said he) a young man becomes Jorden’s pupil, he becomes his son.’

Having given a specimen of his poetical powers, he was asked by Mr. Jorden, to translate Pope’s Messiah into Latin verse, as a Christmas exercise.  He performed it with uncommon rapidity, and in so masterly a manner, that he obtained great applause from it, which ever after kept him high in the estimation of his College, and, indeed, of all the University.

It is said, that Mr. Pope expressed himself concerning it in terms of strong approbation.  Dr. Taylor told me, that it was first printed for old Mr. Johnson, without the knowledge of his son, who was very angry when he heard of it.

The ‘morbid melancholy,’ which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful manner.  While he was at Lichfield, in the college vacation of the year 1729, he felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible hypochondria, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery.  From this dismal malady he never afterwards was perfectly relieved; and all his labours, and all his enjoyments, were but temporary interruptions of its baleful influence.  He told Mr. Paradise that he was sometimes so languid and inefficient, that he could not distinguish the hour upon the town-clock.

Johnson, upon the first violent attack of this disorder, strove to overcome it by forcible exertions.  He frequently walked to Birmingham and back again, and tried many other expedients, but all in vain.  His expression concerning it to me was ’I did not then know how to manage it.’  His distress became so intolerable, that he applied to Dr. Swinfen, physician in Lichfield, his god-father, and put into his hands a state of his case, written in Latin.  Dr. Swinfen was so much struck with the extraordinary acuteness, research, and eloquence of this paper, that in his zeal for his godson he shewed it to several