which I found, above many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay: as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me." The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort: indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them for seven years without discovering that he was something above the ordinary undergraduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real thing in them they soon compel respect. By the undergraduates Milton was called "The Lady of Christ's." And it is plain, from his own references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college, that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement of his manners. He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32} that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any one could offer him." Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then common at the universities. He says of himself that he had no faculty for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his writings. The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds are not capable of joking. This was partly the common fault of an age whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent stimulus. {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of jests, good or bad. It is evident from his own proud confessions that he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days, always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted with the noblest sort of ambition. He says of himself that, however he might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante. And his "reasonings, together with a certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions." And in repudiating an impudently false charge against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained. "Having had the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,—that, if unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34} such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . . Thus large I have purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."

Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself, conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth. When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect, though probably not popularity. The tone of the sixth of the academic Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular, he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering. He says that "nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described without obvious absurdity.

We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration in his nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence, that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most ingenious persons of his House." He had, as Wood says, "performed the collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all." The power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on his face. It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet. Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas On the Death of a Fair Infant, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble Ode {36} on the Nativity begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though this is not certain; the pretty little Song on May Morning which one likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on attaining the age of twenty-three. None of these except the lines on Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645. But the fact that those lines were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that Milton was already known as a young poet. There is also a story that the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary Cambridge collection. But whether this were so or not (and no such volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript copies. He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his Reason of Church Government, that, from