Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/343

Rh MILTON 325 corporal punishment. The legend deserves no credit ; but it is certain that Milton, on account of some disagreement with Chappell, leading to the interference of Dr Bainbrigge, left college for a time, and that, when he did return, it v/as under an arrangement which, while securing that he should not lose a term by his absence, transferred him from the tutorship of Chappell to that of Mr Nathaniel Tovey, another of the fellows of Christ s. From a reference to the matter in 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 undergraduate- ship, he was generally unpopular, for the same reason, among the younger men of his college. They had nick named him &quot; The Lady,&quot; a nickname which the students of the other colleges took up, con verting it into &quot; The Lady of Christ s College &quot; ; and, though the allusion was chiefly to the peculiar grace of his personal appearance, it con veyed also a sneer at what the rougher men thought his unusual prudishness, the haughty fastidiousness of his tastes and morals. Quite as distinct as the information that he was for a while unpopular with the majority of his fellow-students are the proofs that they all came round him at last with respect and deference. The change had cer tainly occurred before January 1628-29, when, at the age of twenty, he took his B.A. degree. By that time his intel lectual pre-eminence in his college, and indeed among his coevals in the whole university, had come to be acknow ledged. 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 and mandate, 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. His signature in the University Register stands at the head of the list of those who graduated as masters that year from Christ s. Anthony Wood s summary of the facts of his university career as a whole is that he &quot;performed the collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all, and was esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts.&quot; The statement is in perfect accordance with Milton s own account. He speaks of &quot; a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughti ness, and self-esteem of what I was or what I might be,&quot; as one of his earliest characteristics ; and, though intimat ing that, even while actually a student at Cambridge, he had &quot; never greatly admired &quot; the system of the place, he leaves us in no doubt as to the quite exceptional applause with which he had gone through all the prescribed work. To the regular Latin and Greek of the university he had added, he tells us, French, Italian, and Hebrew. He had also learnt fencing and other gentlemanly exercises of the time, and was an expert swordsman. Of Milton s skill at Cambridge in what Wood calls &quot; the collegiate and academical exercises &quot; specimens remain in his Prolusiones Quxdam Oratories. They consist of seven rhetorical Latin essays, generally in a whimsical vein, delivered by him, in his undergraduateship or during his subsequent bachelorship in arts, either in the hall of Christ s College or in the public University School. Relics of Milton s Cambridge period are also four of his j Li tin Familiar Epistles; but more important are the pc &amp;gt; fcical remains. These include the greater number of his preserved Latin poems to wit, (1) the seven pieces which compose his Elegiarum Liber, two of the most interesting of them addressed to his medical friend, Charles Diodati, and one to his former tutor Young in his exile at Ham burg, (2) the five short Gunpowder Plot epigrams, now appended to the Elegies, and (3) the first five pieces of the Sytvarum Liber, the most important of which are the hexa meter poem &quot;In Quintum Novembris&quot; and the piece entitled &quot;Naturam non pati senium.&quot; Of the English poems of the Cambridge period the following is a dated list: On the Death of a Fair Infant, 1625-26, the subject being the death in that inclement winter of his infant niece, the first-born child of his sister Mrs 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 lines OH Shakespeare, certainly belonging to that year; the two facetious pieces On the University Carrier, 1630-31 ; 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 manage ment 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, accordingly, 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 &quot; tyranny had invaded the church,&quot; and that, finding he could not honestly subscribe the oaths and obligations required, he &quot; thought it better to preserve a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking begun with servitude and forswearing.&quot; In other words, he was disgusted with the system of high prelacy which Laud, who had been bishop of London and minister paramount in ecclesiastical matters since 1628, was establishing and maintaining in the Church of England. &quot; Church-outed by the prelates,&quot; as he emphatically expresses it, he seems to have thought for a time of the law. From that too he recoiled ; and, leav ing the legal profession for his brother Christopher, he had decided that the only life possible for himself was one of leisurely independence, 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 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 &quot; belatedness &quot; 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 con clusion 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 miles off, he