Life of John Milton | Page 7

academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable,
perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the
Spirit. No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree
capable of arousing enthusiasm. It might not indeed have been easy for
a Newman or a Green to captivate the independent soul of Milton, even
at this susceptible period of his life; failing any approach to such
external influence, he would be likely to leave Cambridge the same
man as he entered it. Ere, indeed, he had completed a year's residence,

his studies were interrupted by a temporary rupture with the University,
probably attributable to his having been at first placed under an
uncongenial tutor. William Chappell was an Arminian and a tool of
Laud, who afterwards procured him preferment in Ireland, and, as
Professor Masson judges from his treatise on homiletics, "a man of dry,
meagre nature." His relations with such a pupil could not well be
harmonious; and Aubrey charges him with unkindness, a vague
accusation rendered tangible by the interlined gloss, "Whipt him."
Hence the legend, so dear to Johnson, that Milton was the last man to
be flogged at college. But Aubrey can hardly mean anything more than
that Chappell on some occasion struck or beat his pupil, and this
interpretation is supported by Milton's verses to Diodati, written in the
spring of 1626, in which, while acknowledging that he had been
directed to withdraw from Cambridge ("_nec dudum vetiti me laris
angit amor_") he expresses his intention of speedily returning:--
"Stat quoque juncosas Cami remeare paludes, Atque iterum raucae
murmur adire scholae."
A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be
likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a
scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly his.
Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication
unnecessary. That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears
from his not having been mulcted of a term's residence, his absence
notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell
lost his pupil. His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his
patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned "excellent talent."
What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.
This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton's University
life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course. Had it indeed
implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in either
case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his subsequent
career. He went steadily through the academic course, which to attain
the degree of Master of Arts, then required seven years' residence. He
graduated as Bachelor at the proper time, March, 1629, and proceeded

Master in July, 1632. His general relations with the University during
the period may be gathered partly from his own account in after years,
when perhaps he in some degree "confounded the present feelings with
the past," partly from a remarkable passage in one of his academical
exercises, fortunately preserved to us, the importance of which was first
discerned by his editor and biographer Mitford. Professor Masson,
however, ascertained the date, which is all important. We must picture
Milton "affable, erect, and manly," as Wood describes him, speaking
from a low pulpit in the hall of Christ's College, to an audience of
various standing, from grave doctors to skittish undergraduates, with
most of whom he was in daily intercourse. The term is the summer of
1628, about nine months before his graduation; the words were Latin,
but we resort to the version of Professor Masson:--
"Then also there drew and invited me, in no ordinary degree, to
undertake this part your very recently discovered graciousness to me.
For when, some few months ago, I was about to perform an oratorical
office before you, and was under the impression that any lucubrations
whatsoever of mine would be the reverse of agreeable to you, and
would have more merciful judges in Aeacus and Minos than almost any
of you would prove, truly, beyond my fancy, beyond my hope if I had
any, they were, as I heard, nay, as I myself felt, received with the not
ordinary applause of all--yea, of those who at other times were, on
account of disagreements in our studies, altogether of an angry and
unfriendly spirit towards me. A generous mode of exercising rivalry
this, and not unworthy of a royal breast, if, when friendship itself is
wont often to misconstrue much that is blamelessly done, yet then
sharp and hostile enmity did not grudge to interpret much that was
perchance erroneous, and not a little, doubtless, that was unskilfully
said, more clemently than I merited."
It is sufficiently manifest from this that after two years' residence