Page:The Complete Poetical Works of John Milton.djvu/18

 terian curate, whom he reverenced tenderly in later life, and afterwards at St. Paul's School, he applied himself so eagerly to his studies that, as he himself says, from his twelfth year on he rarely left his books before midnight. Besides reading the classical authors necessary for admission to the university, he was allowed to wander freely through the literature of his own tongue; the poets who have left the most distinct trace on his early work are Spenser and Sylvester, the latter in his translation of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French moralistic poet Du Bartas. In Milton's earliest verses, the paraphrases of Psalms and, written at fifteen, commentators have discerned traces of reading from such diverse authors as Chaucer, Drayton, Drummond, Fairfax (the translator of Tasso) and Buchanan. A portrait by the Dutch painter Jansen which has been preserved to us, painted, it is true, before this passion for study began, but doubtless representing faithfully enough the features which Milton retained through boyhood, shows a reassuringly healthy little face. The gaze is frank and level, though with a sweet after-seriousness; the form under the black braided dress betrays a delicate vigor, and the firm lines of the head are emphasized by the close-cropping of the auburn hair.

The one event worth chronicle in his school life is his friendship with Charles Diodati, a young Anglo-Italian whom he met at St. Paul's school. It was full of boyish generosity and emulation, and was perhaps the warmest human relationship which Milton ever experienced. It continued to grow in spite of their separation. Diodati went to Oxford, and Milton, at the age of sixteen, entered Christ's College, Cambridge.

The routine of a seventeenth-century college, with its fixed tasks and small tutorial methods, could hardly fail to be irksome to a spirit like Milton's, just awakening to the first arrogant consciousness of power. He complains that he is dragged from his studies," and compelled to employ himself in "composing some trivial declamation." Whether on this or some other score, he got into trouble with his tutor Chappell, was rusticated for a time, and on his return was transferred to another tutor. A Latin verse-epistle (Elegy I) addressed to Diodati, recounting gaily his visits to the theatres and parks of London, marks the date of his temporary suspension. The same epistle contains a rapturous eulogy of the girls of London, the tone of which, with its youthful hyperbole and ardor, is particularly pleasant in his case.

For already he had begun to lay the foundations of that "conscious moral architecture" which was to be the dominant ideal of his life and to mark him out sharply among the spontaneous and desultory race of poets. His college companions, noting his fresh-colored oval face, his flowing auburn hair, his slender frame, his fastidiousness in manners and in morals, nicknamed him, with the happy offhand criticism given to undergraduates, the "Lady of Christ's." What they interpreted as feminine in him was really the expression of a deep conviction on his part,―a conviction virile enough, since it was to determine his whole conscious existence, but so far removed into the realm of ideality that it may well have seemed