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"From the Register of Matriculations of the University of Oxford. 1822 Jan. 15. Coll. Pemb. Gordon Willoughby Jacobus Gill, 18, Gulielmi, de par. S. Mariæ bonæ Arm. fil. 3ius.
A true extract, made 30 Jany., 1903 by T. Vere Bayne, Keeper of the Archives."
Unfortunately, this entry is not an autograph: all the other entries on the page which contains it are, as the Keeper of the Archives informs me, in the same handwriting. The Oxford University Calendar for 1823 gives (p. 275) our author's names in this form and sequence: James Willoughby Gordon Gill. This form and order are repeated in the Oxford University Calendar for the years 1824 and 1825. In the alphabetical index to the Calendar for 1823-1824-1825 this Pembroke undergraduate is entered as: Gill, James G. W. As the editors of the semi-official Calendar derive their information from the College authorities, we may take it that, from 1822 to 1825 inclusive, the future author passed as James Gill at Pembroke, and amongst those who knew him best. It cannot be supposed that the Master and Fellows of Pembroke made a wrong return for three consecutive years, nor that they wilfully reversed the order of Gill's Christian names with the express object of annoying him. Had they done either of these things, Gill was the very man to protest energetically: his conduct in later years snows that he was punctilious in these matters. However, it is right to bear in mind that the Matricula Book gives Gill's Christian names in the same order as they appear on his title-pages. I have failed to obtain any details of his career at Pembroke. Mr. Wood, the present Librarian at Pembroke, states that there is "no proper record" of the Commoners at that College in Gill's time. On this point I have only to say that the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was in residence at Pembroke with Gill, and that information concerning Beddoes's undergraduate days is apparently not lacking. Possibly more careful research might discover some trace of Gill at Oxford. He seems to have taken no degree, and to have left no memory or tradition at Pembroke. He himself tells us (A Tractate on Language, First Edition, p. iii) that when at Oxford "he formed an acquaintance with a gentleman of considerable erudition, but not of either University, who had made the English tongue his peculiar care." To this association we owe A Tractate on Language, and, perhaps, the peculiarities of style which Gill afterwards developed. But, in the latter respect, a serious responsibility may attach to Milton; for, in his Tractate, Gill refers to the poet and laments (p. 224) that, at the period of which he speaks, "the Allegro and Penseroso were confined to the closets of the judicious." The inference is that Gill modelled his diction on both these poems.