knew her son as the author of Comus, though it is surely a duty to believe that no son would have poems like L’Allegro and Il Penseroso in his desk, and not at least once produce them and read them aloud to his mother.  These poems, though not published till 1645, were certainly composed in his mother’s life.  She died before the troubles began, the strife and contention in which her well-graced son, the poet, the dreamer of all things beautiful and cultured, the author of the glancing, tripping measure—

‘Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity’—

was destined to take a part, so eager and so fierce, and for which he was to sacrifice twenty years of a poet’s life.

The poet was sent to St. Paul’s School, where he had excellent teaching of a humane and

expanding character, and he early became, what he remained until his sight left him, a strenuous reader and a late student.

‘Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen on some high, lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear.’

Whether the maid who was told off by the elder Milton to sit up till twelve or one o’clock in the morning for this wonderful Pauline realized that she was a kind of doorkeeper in the house of genius, and blessed accordingly, is not known, and may be doubted.  When sixteen years old Milton proceeded to Christ’s College, Cambridge, where his memory is still cherished; and a mulberry-tree, supposed in some way to be his, rather unkindly kept alive.  Milton was not a submissive pupil; in fact, he was never a submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson’s malicious remark, that man in Milton’s opinion was born to be a rebel, and woman a slave.

But in most cases, at all events, the rebel did well to be rebellious, and perhaps he was never so entirely in the right as when he protested against the slavish traditions of Cambridge educational methods in 1625.

Universities must, however, at all times prove

disappointing places to the young and ingenuous soul, who goes up to them eager for literature, seeing in every don a devotee to intellectual beauty, and hoping that lectures will, by some occult process—the genius loci—initiate him into the mysteries of taste and the storehouses of culture.  And then the improving conversation, the flashing wit, the friction of mind with mind,—these are looked for, but hardly found; and the young scholar groans in spirit, and perhaps does as Milton did—quarrels with his tutor.  But if he is wise he will, as Milton also did, make it up again, and get the most that he can from his stony-hearted stepmother before the time comes for him to bid her his Vale vale et æternum vale.

Milton remained seven years at Cambridge—from 1625 to 1632—from his seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year.  Any intention or thought he ever may have had of taking orders he seems early to have rejected with a characteristic scorn.  He considered a state of subscription to articles a state of slavery, and Milton was always determined, whatever else he was or might become, to be his own man.  Though never in sympathy with the governing tone of the place, there is no reason to suppose that Milton (any more than

others) found this lack seriously to interfere with a fair amount of good solid enjoyment from day to day.  He had friends who courted his society, and pursuits both grave and gay to occupy his hours of study and relaxation.  He was called the ‘Lady’ of his college, on account of his personal beauty and the purity and daintiness of his life and conversation.

After leaving Cambridge Milton began his life, so attractive to one’s thoughts, at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a house in which his mother was living.  Here, for five years, from his twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year—a period often stormy in the lives of poets—he continued his work of self-education.  Some of his Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious.  His second sonnet records this state of feeling:

‘How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th.’

And yet no poet had ever a more beautiful springtide, though it was restless, as spring

should be, with the promise of greater things and ‘high midsummer pomps.’  These latter it was that were postponed almost too long.

Milton at Horton made up his mind to be a great poet—neither more nor less; and with that end in view he toiled unceasingly.  A more solemn dedication of a man by himself to the poetical office cannot be imagined.  Everything about him became, as it were, pontifical, almost sacramental.  A poet’s soul must contain the perfect shape of all things good, wise, and just.  His body must be spotless and without blemish, his life pure, his thoughts high, his studies intense.  There was no drinking at the ‘Mermaid’ for John Milton.  His thoughts, like his joys, were not those that

‘are in widest commonalty spread.’

When in his walks he met the Hodge of his period, he is more likely to have thought of a line in Virgil than of stopping to have a chat with the poor fellow.  He became a student of the Italian language, and writes to a friend: ‘I who certainly have not merely wetted the tip of my lips in the stream of these (the classical) languages, but in proportion to my years have swallowed the most copious draughts, can yet

sometimes retire with avidity and delight to feast on Dante, Petrarch, and many others; nor has Athens itself been able to confine me to the transparent waves of its Ilissus, nor ancient Rome to the banks of its Tiber, so as to prevent my visiting with delight the streams of the Arno and the hills of Fæsolæ.’

Now it was that he, in his often-quoted words written to the young Deodati, doomed to an early death, was meditating ‘an immortality of fame,’ letting his wings grow and preparing to fly.  But dreaming though he ever was of things to come, none the less, it was at Horton he composed Comus, Lycidas, L’Allegro, and Il Penseroso, poems which enable us half sadly to realize how much went and how much was sacrificed to make the author of Paradise Lost.

After five years’ retirement Milton began to feel the want of a little society, of the kind that is ‘quiet, wise, and good,’ and he meditated taking chambers in one of the Inns of Court, where he could have a pleasant and shady walk under ‘immemorial elms,’ and also enjoy the advantages of a few choice associates at home and an elegant society abroad.  The death of his mother in 1637 gave his thoughts another direction, and he obtained his father’s permission

to travel to Italy, ‘that woman-country, wooed not wed,’ which has been the mistress of so many poetical hearts, and was so of John Milton’s.  His friends and relatives saw but one difficulty in the way.  John Milton the younger, though not at this time a Nonconformist, was a stern and unbending Protestant, and was as bitter an opponent of His