Milton | Page 7

Paul's School by a private tutor,
one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian figure,
and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one except
himself. The elder John Milton was a remarkable man. He had, to begin
with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a line of his
own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but always
indicates force of character. The poet's grandfather, who lived in the
Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism and
is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and something
of a Puritan. The son went to London, set up in business as a scrivener,
that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and prospered so much

that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the country. He had
considerable musical talents, and his compositions are found in
collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland and
Orlando Gibbons contributed. His house was no doubt full of music, as
were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries,
and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense
delight in music which appears in all his works. No poet speaks of
music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art. The
untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so
much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of
those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his
soul.
In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the
king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's
European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold
himself, the future author of Paradise Lost went into residence at
Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can
boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he
had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and
evidently made an impression on his contemporaries. No doubt the
strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made
him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with
genius. From the beginning he had the passion of the student. He says
of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before
midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father
"ordered the maid to sit up for him." And his studies were in the main
the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of them.
All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning, and for the
great tradition of literature which it is the true business of scholarship
to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics and theology,
contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always the exact
opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of the tabula
rasa, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets so barren. The
greatest of all proofs of the strength of his individuality is that it so
entirely dominates the vast store of learning and association with which
his poetry is loaded. Such a man will at least give his university a

chance; and, though Milton did not in later life look back on
Cambridge with great affection or respect, there can be no doubt that
the seven years he spent within the walls of a college were far from
useless to the poet who more than any other {30} was to make learning
serve the purposes of poetry.
So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to be
altogether popular either with the authorities or with his companions.
Nor was he, at any rate at first. He had some difference with his tutor,
had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on very doubtful
evidence, to have been flogged. But, whatever his fault was, it was
nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to the affair in
his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge inquiry into his
Cambridge career. Nor did it injure him permanently with the
authorities. He took his degrees at the earliest possible dates, and ten
years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly and gratefully
of "the more than ordinary respect 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