When Samuel Johnson left Lichfield for London in 1737, he dreamed not of fame and fortune but of a reputation as a scholar. As Robert DeMaria writes, the young Johnson chose “his heroes from the … European scholar-poets,” including “Buchanan, Scaliger, Erasmus, Heinsius, and Burman” – all distinguished classicists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and he longed to join their ranks.

In the eighteenth century, the word scholarship meant proficiency in Greek and Latin – the modern languages were only just beginning to receive serious attention. But Johnson was well prepared for a career in classical studies. Sir John Hawkins noted that he “had through his life a propensity to Latin composition: he shewed it very early at school” (Hawkins, Life, p. 9). When he went to Pembroke College, Oxford, for a kind of admissions interview, his father “seemed very full of the merits of his son, and told the company he was a good scholar, and a poet, and wrote Latin verses.” But Johnson himself sat silent and failed to impress. In the course of conversation, though, “he suddenly struck in and quoted Macrobius” – a fairly obscure fifth-century grammarian – and the tutor knew at once he was dealing with a serious young man. “Thus,” writes Boswell, “he gave the first impression of that more extensive reading in which he had indulged himself” (Boswell, Life, 1:59).