Milton | Page 9

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 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