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 puts it, to 'blow a dolorous and jarring blast' at the divine command. Lycidas becomes intelligible as Milton's utterance when 'looking to his equipment' (as Professor Raleigh says) 'if perchance he may live to do that in poetry and politics which King had died leaving unaccomplished.' In his mind, the cause of Puritanism is identical with the cause of liberal culture in general. Mr. Verity makes the remark, natural to a Cambridge man, that it might have been better had Milton been sent to the great Puritan college, Emmanuel. Its Puritanism, he thinks, would have made Cambridge life more congenial. At Emmanuel, I may add, he would have been brought into relations with the remarkable set of men known afterwards as the Cambridge Platonists. Whichcote was nearly his contemporary, and Cudworth, Culverwell, and John Smith a little his juniors. With them, perhaps, he might have 'unsphered the spirit of Plato' to better purpose; and found out that there was a more philosophical method of escaping from the ecclesiastical tyranny of Laud than the acceptance of the harshest Puritanic dogmatism. Milton, however, was as little as possible of a philosophic reasoner; and for the present his vocation meant an un-