The first sixteen years of Milton’s life, coinciding exactly with the last sixteen of the reign of James I., associate themselves with the house in Bread Street, and with the surroundings of that house in Old London. His father, while prospering in business, continued to be known as a man of “ingeniose” tastes, and even acquired some distinctior in the London musical world of that time by his occasional contributions to important musical publications. Music was thus a part of the poet’s domestic education from his infancy. Whatever else could be added was added without stint. Again and again AIilton speaks with gratitude and affection of the ungrudging pains bestowed by his father on his early education. “Both at the grammar school and also under other masters at home,” is the statement in one passage, “he caused me to be instructed daily.” This brings us to about the year 1619, when Milton was ten years of age. At that time his domestic tutor was Thomas Young, a Scotsman from Perthshire, and graduate of the university of St Andrews, afterwards a man of no small distinction among the English Puritan clergy, but then only curate or assistant to some parish clergyman in or near London, and eking out his livelihood by private teaching. Young’s tutorship lasted till 1622, when he was drawn abroad by an offer of the pastorship or chaplaincy to the congregation of English merchants in Hamburg. Already, however, for a year or two, his tutorship had been only supplementary to the education which the boy was receiving by daily attendance at St Paul’s public school, close to Bread Street. The headmaster of the school was Mr Alexander Gill, an elderly Oxford divine, of high reputation for scholarship and teaching ability. Under him, as usher or second master, was his son, Alexander Gill the younger, also an Oxford graduate of scholarly reputation, but of blustering character. Milton’s acquaintanceship with this younger Gill, begun at St Paul’s school, led to subsequent friendship and correspondence. Far more affectionate and intimate was the friendship formed by Milton at St Paul’s with a certain young Charles Diodati, his schoolfellow there, the son of a naturalized Italian physician, Dr Theodore Diodati, who had settled in London in good medical practice, and was much respected, both on his own account, and as being the brother of the famous Protestant divine, Jean or Giovanni Diodati of Geneva. Young Diodati, who was destined for his father’s profession, left the school for Oxford University early in 1623; but Milton remained till the end of 1624. A family incident of that year was the marriage of his elder sister, Anne, with Edward Phillips, a clerk in the Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery. Milton had then all but completed his sixteenth year, and was as scholarly, as accomplished, and as handsome a youth as St Paul’s school had sent forth. We learn from himself that his exercises “in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter,” had begun to attract attention even in his boyhood. This implies that he must have had a stock of attempts in English and Latin by him of earlier date than 1624. Of these the only specimens that now remain are his Paraphrase on Psalm CXIV. and his Paraphrase on Psalm CXXXVI.

On February 12, 1624-25, Milton, at the age of sixteen years and two months, was entered as a student of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in the grade of a “Lesser Pensioner.” His matriculation entry in the books of the university is two months later, April 9, 1625. Between these two dates James I. had died, and had been succeeded by Charles I.

Cambridge University was then in the full flush of its prosperity on that old system of university education which combined Latin and Greek studies with plentiful drill and disputation in the scholastic logic and philosophy, but with little of physical science, and next to no mathematics. There were sixteen colleges in all, dividing among them a total of about 2900 members of the university. Christ’s College, to which Milton belonged, ranked about third in the university in respect of numbers, counting about 265 members on its books. The master was Dr Thomas Bainbrigge; and among the thirteen fellows were Mr Joseph Meade, still remembered as a commentator on the Apocalypse, and Mr 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- 31, at the age of fifteen.

Milton’s academic course lasted seven years and five months, or from February 1624-25 to July 1632, 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 that quarrel between him and his tutor, Mr 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, leading to the interference of Dr Bainbrigge, left college for a time, and that, when he did return, it was 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 tλvo 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 College”; 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. Quite as distinct as the information that he was for a λvhile 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 certainly occurred before January 1628-29, when, at the age of twenty, he took his B.A. degree. By that time his intellectual pre-eminence in his college, and indeed among his coevals in the whole university, 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 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 Μ.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 “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.” The statement is in perfect accordance with Milton’s own account. He speaks of “a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem of what I was or what I might be,” as one of his earliest characteristics; and, though intimating that, even while actually a student at Cambridge, he had “never greatly admired” 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 “the collegiate and academical exercises” specimens remain in his Prolusiones Quaedam 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 I.: tin Familiar Epistles·, but more important are the p< V tical 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 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” and the piece entitled “Naturam non pati senium.” 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 On 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 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 Coinbrook, 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 “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.” 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. “Church-outed by the prelates,” as he emphatically expresses it, he seems to have thought for a time of the law. From that too he recoiled; and, leaving 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 “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 miles 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, along with reprints of the commendatory verses that had appeared in the first folio, one of them Ben Jonson’s immortal tribute to Shakespeare’s memory. Among the poems actually written by Milton at Horton the first, in all probability, after the Latin hexameters A d Patrem, were the exquisite companion pieces I.'Allegro and II Penseroso. There followed, in or about 1633, the fragment called Arcades. It was part of a pastoral masque got up by the young people of the noble family of Egerton in honour of their venerable relative the countess-dowager of Derby, and performed before that lady at her mansion of Harefield, near Uxbridge, about 10 miles from Horton. That Milton contributed the words for the entertainment was, almost certainly, owing to his friendship with Henry Lawes, one of the chief court musicians of that time, whose known connexion with the Egerton family points him out as the probable manager of the Harefield masque. Next in order among the compositions at Horton may be mentioned the three short pieces, At a Solemn Music, On Time, and Upon the Circumcision; after which comes Cornus, the largest and most important of all Milton’s minor poems. The name by which that beautiful drama is now universally known was not given to it by Milton himself. He entitled it, more simply and vaguely, “A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, before the Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales.” The existence of this poem is certainly due to Milton’s intimacy with Lawes. The earl of Bridgewater, the head of the Egerton family, had been appointed to the high office of the presidency or viceroyalty of Wales, the official seat of which was Ludlow in Shropshire; it had been determined that among the festivities on his assumption of the office there should be a great masque in the hall of Ludlow Castle, with Lawes for the stage manager and one of the actors; Milton had been applied to by Lawes for the poetry; and, actually, on Michaelmas night, September 29, 1634, the drama furnished by Milton was performed in Ludlow Castle before a great assemblage of the nobility and gentry of the Welsh principality, Lawes taking the part of “the attendant spirit,” while the parts of “first brother,” “second brother,” and “the lady” were taken by the earl’s three youngest children, Viscount Brackley, Mr Thomas Egerton, and Lady Alice Egerton.—From September 1634 to the beginning of 1637 is a comparative blank in our records. Straggling incidents in this blank are a Latin letter of date December 4, 1634, to Alexander Gill the younger, a Greek Translation of Psalm CXIV., a visit to Oxford in 1635 for the purpose of incorporation in the degree of Μ.A. in that university, and the beginning in May 1636 of a troublesome lawsuit against his now aged and infirm father.—The lawsuit, which was instituted by a certain Sir Thomas Cotton, baronet, nephew and executor of a deceased John Cotton, Esq., accused the elder Milton and his partner Bower, or both, of having, in their capacity as scriveners, misappropriated divers large sums of money that had been entrusted to them by the deceased Cotton to be let out at interest. The lawsuit was still in progress when, on the 3d of April 1637, Milton’s mother died, at the age of about sixty-five. A flat blue stone, with a brief inscription, visible on the chancel-pavement of Horton church, still marks the place of her burial. Milton’s testimony to her character is that she was a “a most excellent mother and particularly known for her charities through the neighbourhood.” The year 1637 was otherwise eventful in his biography. It was in that year that his Cornus, after lying in manuscript for more than two years, was published by itself, in the form of a small quarto of thirty-five pages. The author’s name was withheld, and the entire responsibility of the publication was assumed by Henry Lawes. Milton seems to have been in London when the little volume appeared. He was a good deal in London, at all events, during the summer and autumn months immediately following his mother’s death. The plague, which had been on one of its periodical visits of ravage through England since early in the preceding year, was then especially severe in the Horton neighbourhood, while London was comparatively free. It was probably in London that Milton heard of the death of young Edward King of Christ’s College, whom he had left as one of the most popular of the fellows of the college, and one of the clerical hopes of the university. King had sailed from Chester for a vacation...