Life of John Milton | Page 6

of Psalms executed at fifteen, remain to attest the boy's proficiency in
contemporary English literature. Some of the unconscious borrowings
attributed to him are probably mere coincidences, but there is still
enough to evince acquaintance with "Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond,
Drayton, Chaucer, Fairfax, and Buchanan." The literary merit of these
versions seems to us to have been underrated. There may be no
individual phrase beyond the compass of an apt and sensitive boy with
a turn for verse-making; but the general tone is masculine and emphatic.
There is not much to say, but what is said is delivered with a "large
utterance," prophetic of the "os magna soniturum," and justifying his
own report of his youthful promise:--"It was 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 by this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely
to live."
Among the incidents of Milton's life at St. Paul's School should not be
forgotten his friendship with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese
physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy
for his Protestantism. A friendship memorable not only as Milton's
tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love
of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the
undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire
the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of
the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which,
about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the
classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It
has been remarked, however, that his use of "Penseroso," incorrect both
in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy he
was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as "a
lesser pensioner" at Christ's College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625;
the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including Spenser,
and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron,
and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.
The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose
Liberalism had got him into trouble at that University. He may also
have been unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his
estranged relatives. Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had
married Mr. Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown,
now abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and
judicial writs. From this marriage were to spring the young men who
were to find an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.
The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill
represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now
exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately
architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about,
over narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive,
white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison.

So modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery
Latin inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert
Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as
any in the universe. Sheep and swine perambulate the environs, and
green spaces are interspersed among the colleges, sparsely set with
trees, so pollarded as to justify Milton's taunt when in an ill-humour
with his university:--
"Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles, Quam male
Phoebicolis convenit ille locus!"
His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly
suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual
physiognomy, and that of the university in general, must be learned
from the exhaustive pages of Professor Masson. A book unpublished
when he wrote, Ball's life of Dr. John Preston, Master of Emmanuel,
vestige of an entire continent of submerged Puritanism, also contributes
much to the appreciation of the place and time. We can here but briefly
characterize the University as an institution undergoing modification,
rather by the decay of the old than by the intrusion of the new. The
revolution by which mathematics became the principal instrument of
culture was still to be deferred forty years. Milton, who tells us that he
delighted in mathematics, might have been nearly ignorant of that
subject if he pleased, and hardly could become proficient in it by the
help of his Alma Mater. The scholastic philosophy, however, still
reigned. But even here tradition was shaky and undermined; and in
matters of discipline the rigid code which nominally governed the
University was practically much relaxed. The teaching staff was
respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops. But
while the