in the grade of a “Lesser Pensioner,” and he matriculated two months later, on the 9th of April 1625. The master of Christ’s was Dr Thomas Bainbrigge; and among the thirteen fellows were Joseph Meade, still remembered as a commentator on the Apocalypse, and William Chappell, afterwards an Irish bishop. It was under Chappell’s tutorship that Milton was placed when he first entered the college. At least three students who entered Christ’s after Milton, but during his residence, deserve mention. One was Edward King, a youth of Irish birth and high Irish connexions, who entered in 1626, at the age of fourteen, another was John Cleveland, afterwards known as royalist and satirist, who entered in 1627; and the third was Henry More, subsequently famous as the Cambridge Platonist, who entered in 1631, just before Milton left. Milton’s own brother, Christopher, joined him in the college in February 1630–1631, at the age of fifteen.
Milton’s academic course lasted seven years and five months, bringing him from his seventeenth year to his twenty-fourth. The first four years were his time of undergraduateship. It was in the second of these—the year 1626—that there occurred the quarrel between him and his tutor, Chappell, which Dr Johnson, making the most of a lax tradition from Aubrey, magnified into the supposition that Milton may have been one of the last students in either of the English universities that suffered the indignity of corporal punishment. The legend deserves no credit; but it is certain that Milton, on account of some disagreement with Chappell, left college for a time, though he did not lose his term; and that when he did return, he was transferred from the tutorship of Chappell to that of Nathaniel Tovey. From the first of the Latin elegies one infers that the cause of the quarrel was some outbreak of self-assertion on Milton’s part. We learn indeed, from words of his own elsewhere, that it was not only Chappell and Bainbrigge that he had offended by his independent demeanour, but that, for the first two or three years of his undergraduateship, he was generally unpopular, for the same reason, among the younger men of his college. They had nicknamed him “the Lady”—a nickname which the students of the other colleges took up, converting it into “the Lady of Christ’s”; and, though the allusion was chiefly to the peculiar grace of his personal appearance, it conveyed also a sneer at what the rougher men thought his unusual prudishness, the haughty fastidiousness of his tastes and morals. A change in this state of things had certainly occurred before January 1628–1629, when, at the age of twenty, he took his B.A. degree. By that time his intellectual preeminence had come to be acknowledged. His reputation for scholarship and literary genius, extraordinary even then, was more than confirmed during the remaining three years and a half of his residence in Cambridge. A fellowship in Christ’s which fell vacant in 1630 would undoubtedly have been his had the election to such posts depended then absolutely on merit. As it was, the fellowship was conferred, by royal favour on Edward King, his junior in college standing by sixteen months. In July 1632 Milton completed his career at the university by taking his M.A. degree. Tradition still points out Milton’s rooms at Christ’s College. They are on the first floor on the first stair on the north side of the great court.
Of Milton’s skill at Cambridge, in what Wood calls “the collegiate and academical exercises,” specimens remain in his Prolusiones quaedam oratoriae. They consist of seven rhetorical Latin essays, generally in a whimsical vein, delivered by him, either in the hall of Christ’s College or in the public university schools. To Milton’s Cambridge period belong four of his Latin “Familiar Epistles,” and the greater number of his preserved Latin poems, including: (1) the seven pieces, written in 1626, which compose his Elegiarum liber, two of the most interesting of them addressed to his friend, Charles Diodati, and one to his former tutor, Young, in his exile at Hamburg; (2) the five short Gunpowder Plot epigrams, now appended to the Elegies; and (3) the first five pieces of the Sylvarum liber, the most important of which are the hexameter poem “In quintum novembris” (1626), and the piece entitled Naturam non pati senium (1628). Of the English poems of the Cambridge period the following is a dated list: “On the Death of a fair Infant” (1625–1626), the subject being the death of the first-born child of his sister Anne Phillips; “At a Vacation Exercise in the College” (1628), the magnificent Christmas ode; “on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1629); the fragment called “The Passion” and the “Song on May Morning,” both probably belonging to 1630; the sonnet “On Shakespeare,” certainly belonging to that year, printed in the Shakespeare folio of 1632; the two facetious pieces “On the University Carrier” (1630–1631); the “Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester” (1631); the sonnet “To the Nightingale,” probably of the same year; the sonnet “On arriving at the Age of twenty-three,” dating itself certainly in December 1631.
Just before Milton quitted Cambridge, his father, then verging on his seventieth year, had practically retired from his Bread Street business, leaving the active management of it to a partner, named Thomas Bower, a former apprentice of his, and had gone to spend his declining years at Horton in Buckinghamshire, a small village near Colnbrook, and not far from Windsor. Here, in a house close to Horton church, Milton mainly resided for the next six years—from July 1632 to April 1638.
Although, when he had gone to Cambridge, it had been with the intention of becoming a clergyman, that intention had been abandoned. His reasons were that “tyranny had invaded the church,” and that, finding he could not honestly subscribe the oaths and obligations required he “thought it better to preserve a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, begun with servitude and forswearing.”[1] In other words, he was disgusted with the system which Laud was establishing and maintaining in the Church of England. “Church-outed by the prelates,” as he emphatically expresses it, he seems to have thought for a time of the law, but he decided that the only life possible for himself was one dedicated wholly to scholarship and literature. His compunctions on this subject, expressed already in his sonnet on arriving at his twenty-third year, are expressed more at length in an English letter of which two drafts are preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge, sent by him, shortly after the date of that sonnet, and with a copy of the sonnet included, to some friend who had been remonstrating with him on his “belatedness” and his persistence in a life of mere dream and study. There were gentle remonstrances also from his excellent father. Between such a father and such a son, however, the conclusion was easy. What it was may be learnt from Milton’s fine Latin poem Ad patrem. There, in the midst of an enthusiastic recitation of all that his father had done for him hitherto, it is intimated that the agreement between them on their one little matter of difference was already complete, and that, as the son was bent on a private life of literature and poetry, it had been decided that he should have his own way, and should in fact, so long as he chose, be the master of his father’s means and the chief person in the Horton household. For the six years from 1632 this, accordingly, was Milton’s position. In perfect leisure, and in a pleasant rural retirement, with Windsor at the distance of an easy walk, and London only about 17 m. off, he went through, he tells us, a systematic course of reading in the Greek and Latin classics, varied by mathematics, music, and the kind of physical science we should now call cosmography.
It is an interesting fact that Milton’s very first public appearance in the world of English authorship was in so honourable a place as the second folio edition of Shakespeare in 1632. His enthusiastic eulogy on Shakespeare, written in 1630, was one of three anonymous pieces prefixed to that second folio. Among the poems actually written by Milton at Horton the first, in all probability, after the Latin hexameters Ad patrem, were the exquisite companion pieces L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. There followed, in or about 1633, the fragment called Arcades. It was part of a pastoral masque performed by the young people of the noble family of Egerton before the countess-dowager
- ↑ See the preface to Book II. of his Reason of Church Government (1641–1642), which is of great biographical interest.
