his early youth, it had been found that, "whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain signs it had, was likely to live." He published these bold words in 1641, when he had given no public proof at all of their truth. Such a man was not likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death aroused much public interest, or the Ode on the Nativity, plainly challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.

He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end of his university career. But what surprised his contemporaries was that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other. Leaving Cambridge when he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house at Horton near Windsor. His father, and other friends, very {38} naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity. To them all the answer is the same. He cannot now enter the Church, as he had intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he could not keep. He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the arms of studious retirement." No; he has other things in view than these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or late but of being fit. And the work for which he is preparing is in his own mind a settled thing. It is literature, poetry, and, in particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take its place among the great poems of the world.

The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a lucrative profession. Most poets, like other artists, have had to face family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward call. In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions. Many poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a poetic son. The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no ordinary man. His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world. He had naturally hoped that that son's evident abilities would be exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his sole business in life. The record of this survives in the Latin poem Ad Patrem which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance. It is an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts. Why should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet? Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?

"Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."

The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune. How can you, of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that? You trained me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money making as the object of life. I have chosen a better part than that: and you were the inspirer of my choice. And I know that at heart you agree with it and share it.

The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of classical allusion which is the bane of such productions. So far as we know, it was the last word on its subject. From henceforth no one questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself. If he ever afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to be a still higher call. For the present he lived on quietly at Horton, near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41} London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music, in which sciences I then delighted." Some of these visits to London evidently lasted days or weeks.

The interesting thing about these six years at Horton is that they are the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets lived continuously in the country. And perhaps we may say that they bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton wrote L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, in which he touched rural life and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again equalled. And the most important of the other poems written during these years, Arcades, Comus, and above all, Lycidas, show the same influence. Arcades and Comus point also to the effect of his visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of. His life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42} forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it. Arcades and Comus, and still more the wonderful outburst At a Solemn Music, are visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as Lycidas, which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his old university.

The mention of the poems of these years, the most delightful that Milton was ever to write, show that the six years spent at Horton were not entirely what he calls them, "a complete holiday spent in reading over the Greek and Latin writers." If he had never written another line, he had written enough by the time he left Horton to give him a place among the very greatest men who have practised the art of poetry in England. When he started abroad in 1638 he must have known, and his father too, that his daring choice had already justified itself. "You ask what I am about, what I am thinking of," he writes to his friend Diodati at the end of the Horton time; "why, with God's help, of immortality." It is the voice of a man who knows he has already done great things but counts them as nothing compared with what he is to do later on.

Man proposes. In 1637 Milton was "pluming {43} his wings" for the very mightiest of poetic flights, for such a poem as would give full scope to his genius and place him among the great poets of the world. But in the result he actually wrote less poetry in the next twenty years than he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in quality and importance. The first interruption was the completion of his elaborate education by a grand tour. His generous father, who was well-to-do rather