with the young half-Italian Charles Diodati, his friendship with whom he has made touchingly and everlastingly memorable in his Letters and in his Latin Elegia Prima, Elegia Sexta, and Epitaphium Damonis. He was still, it seems, a

scholar at St. Paul's when his sister Anne Milton, who was a year or two older than himself, married (1624) a Mr. Edward Phillips, from Shrewsbury, second clerk in the important Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery. As the married couple took up their residence in the Strand, near Charing Cross, Milton and his younger brother Christopher were then the only children left in the paternal home.

From his childhood Milton was not only a ceaseless student and insatiable reader, but also a writer of verses. The earliest preserved specimens of his muse, however, belong to the year 1624, his last year at St. Paul's School. They are

1625-1632 ætat. 17-24.

If we deduct the two Psalm-paraphrases, which belong to the last year of the reign of James I., Milton's literary life may be said to begin exactly with the reign of Charles I.

That king succeeded his father on the 27th of March 1625. Six weeks before that event, i.e. February 12, 1624-5, Milton, at the age of sixteen years and two months, had been entered in the grade of a "Lesser Pensioner" on the books of Christ's College, Cambridge; and his matriculation in the Register of the University is dated April 9, 1625, when Charles had been on the throne a fortnight. From that time to July 1632, or for a period of more than seven years, Milton resided habitually in Cambridge, though with frequent visits, in vacation and at other times, to London and his father's house. The rooms he occupied in Christ's College are still pointed out.

When Milton was at Cambridge, the total number of persons on the books of all the sixteen colleges of the University was about 2900. Christ's College had about 265 members on its books. The master of the college was Dr. Thomas Bainbrigge; and among the fellows were Joseph Meade,

remembered as a commentator on the Apocalypse, Mr. William Chappell, who was Milton's first tutor, and became afterwards an Irish bishop, and Mr. Nathaniel Tovey, to whose tutorship Milton was transferred, and who was afterwards Rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. Among Milton's fellow-students at Christ's were Edward King, afterwards commemorated as Lycidas, John Cleveland, afterwards the well-known satirist, and Henry More, afterwards the Cambridge Platonist. They were all Milton's juniors; and indeed More entered the college in Milton's last year. Milton's brother Christopher joined him at Christ's in February 1630-1, and was put under Tovey's tutorship.-Among the eminent heads of colleges when Milton's academic course began were Dr. John Preston of Emanuel, Dr. Samuel Collins of King's, Dr. Samuel Ward of Sidney Sussex, and John Gostlin, M.D., of Caius. The Public Orator of the University was George Herbert the poet; Andrew Downes, of St. John's, was Regius Professor of Greek; Robert Metcalfe, of the same college, was Regius Professor of Hebrew; Thomas Thornton, also of St. John's, was Lecturer in Logic; and Abraham Whelock, the Orientalist, was University Librarian. Among the Fellows or more advanced graduates of the different colleges were about ten men who afterwards rose to be Bishops or Archbishops, others who rose to be heads of colleges, and some who became noted as Puritan divines. Contemporaries of Milton at Cambridge, only a little his seniors in their respective colleges, were the Church-historian Thomas Fuller, of Queens', and the poets Edmund Waller, of King's, and Thomas Randolph, of Trinity. Jeremy Taylor, who was a native of Cambridge, entered Caius College, as a pauper scholar, in August 1626, eighteen months after Milton had entered Christ's.

Although Milton never looked back on Cambridge with any great affection, and although it is certain that in the beginning of his undergraduateship he was unpopular among the rougher men in his own college (where he was nicknamed "The Lady," on account of his fair complexion, feminine and graceful appearance, and a certain haughty delicacy in his tastes and morals), there is, nevertheless, the most positive evidence that his career at the University was one of industrious and persevering success, and that, even before the close of his undergraduateship, he had beaten down all opposition,

"Performed

and gained a reputation quite extraordinary. the Collegiate and Academical Exercises to the admiration of all, and was esteemed to be a virtuous and sober person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts,” is Anthony Wood's summary of the information he had received on the subject. He took his B.A. degree, at the proper time, in Jan. 1628-9, and the M.A. degree, also at the proper time, in July 1632. On each occasion, with the other graduates, he went through the formality of signing Articles of Religion implying faith in the constitution, worship, and doctrines of the Church of England; and on the second occasion his signature "Joannes Milton" stands at the head of the list of twenty-seven who so signed from Christ's College. This looks as if the foremost place in his college was then unanimously accorded to him. By that time, one may say, he was recognised as without an equal among his coevals in the University.

The reputation won by Milton during his seven years at Cambridge was doubtless due in part to his personal impressiveness in walks and talks with select companions, and in all those daily chances of intercourse between seniors and juniors, in hall or in college-rooms, which University life affords. There were, however, the more formal opportunities of those scholarly displays called by Wood "the Collegiate and Academical Exercises”: viz. the periodical Latin debates and declamations, in College or in the Public Schools of the University, which formed so conspicuous a part of the old system of Cambridge training. Seven specimens of Milton's ability in such things have been preserved under the title of Prolusiones Quædam Oratoriæ, and are interesting both as revelations of Milton's own character and habits of intellect at this period, and also as curious glimpses of old Cambridge life. See the Introduction to At a Vacation Exercise. There are preserved also four Latin Familiar Epistles written by Milton during the Cambridge period,—two of them to his former preceptor, Thomas Young; and two to Alexander Gill the younger, his former teacher at St. Paul's School. More important products of the seven Cambridge years, however, were the poems, in English or in Latin, written at intervals. Here is a list of these in chronological order, the more important printed in capitals, and the Latin distinguished from the English by italics :

ON THE DEATH OF A FAIR INFANT. 1626.
AD CAROLUM DIODATUM (Elegia Prima). 1626.
In obitum Præsulis Wintoniensis (Elegia Tertia). 1626.
In obitum Præsulis Eliensis (among the Sylvæ). 1626.

In obitum Præconis Academici Cantabrigiensis (Elegia Secunda 1626.

In obitum Procanceliarii Medici (among the Sylvæ). 1626.

IN QUINTUM NOVEMBRIS (among the Sylvæ). 1626.

In Proditionem Bombardicam; In Eandem; In Eandem; In Eandem; In Inventorem Bombarda (all annexed to the Elegiarum Liber).

Ad Thomam Junium, Præceptorem Suum (Elegia Quarta). 1627. "Nondum blanda tuas," etc. (Elegia Septima). 1628.

NATURAM NON PATI SENIUM (among the Sylva). 1628.
AT A VACATION EXERCISE IN THE COLLEGE. 1628.
De Idea Platonicâ quemadmodum Aristoteles intellexit (among the
Sylva).

In Adventum Veris (Elegia Quinta). 1628-9.

ON THE MORNING OF CHRIST'S NATIVITY. 1629.

AD CAROLUM DIODATUM, RURI COMMORANTEM

(Elegia Sexta). 1629.

The Passion.

Song on May Morning. ?

ON SHAKESPEARE. 1630.

On the University Carrier. 1630-1.

Another on the Same.

1630-1.

AN EPITAPH ON THE MARCHIONESS OF WINCHESTER.

1631.

Sonnet to the Nightingale (Sonnet I.) ?

SONNET ON ARRIVING AT THE AGE OF TWENTYTHREE. (Sonnet II.) Dec. 1631.

From these pieces there may be gathered, as the Introductions to them will indicate, many particulars of Milton's life and the nature of his occupations during his seven years at Cambridge. If published in a little volume in 1632, they would have given young Milton a place of some distinction among contemporary poets. With the exception, however, of Naturam non pati Senium, of which printed copies were made at Cambridge for an academic purpose, and the lines "On Shakespeare,' ," which appeared anonymously in the Second Folio Edition of Shakespeare, published in 1632, all the pieces appear to have remained in manuscript.

The Sonnet which closes the list of the Cambridge pieces is especially interesting. When Milton went to Cambridge, he had been destined, by himself and his friends, for the

Church; but the seven years of his residence there had entirely changed his purpose. This was owing, in part, to the great change that had occurred in the political condition of England. Charles I., married in May 1625 to the French princess Henrietta-Maria, had adopted a policy in Church and State compared with which his father's efforts towards Absolutism had been mild. Having quarrelled successively with three Parliaments, and dismissed the last of them with anger and insult in March 1628-9, he had resolved to have nothing more to do with Parliaments, but to govern in future by his own authority through ministers responsible only to himself. England was in the fourth year of this Reign of Thorough, as it has been called, when Milton's course at the University came to an end. Since the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in August 1628, Charles's chief advisers and ministers had been Laud, Wentworth, Cottington, and a few other select Lords of his Privy Council. In ecclesiastical matters, Laud, Bishop of London since 1628, and with the Archbishopric of Canterbury in prospect, was single and paramount. Under his vigilant supervision there had been going on, in all the dioceses of England, that systematic repression and even persecution of Calvinistic Theology and of all forms of Puritan opinion and practice, and that equally systematic promotion and encouragement of Arminian Theology, the rights of high Prelacy, and a strict and florid ceremonial of worship, which had already, as the Puritans thought, undone all that was essential in the English Reformation, and brought the Church of England back into the shadow of the Church of Rome. Nor did there seem any hope of deliverance. Laud's supremacy in England seemed to be growing surer and surer every day; Wentworth, as Viceroy of Ireland, was to impose the same system on that country; even Scotland, though an independent kingdom, was to be reclaimed, as soon as Laud should be at leisure, from the meagre half-Episcopacy which was all that King James had persuaded her to adopt, and brought into conformity with Laud's ideal of a Church. Unable to endure this state of things, many of the bolder Puritans had gone into exile in Holland or had emigrated to America, while those that remained at home, forming a large mass of the population of England, lay in a dumb agony of discontent, sighing for a Parliament, but not daring to mutter the word. With these