of his equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men "who were the authorities of his college, and who, he says, when he left them in 1632, "signified in many ways how much better it would content them that he would stay." In short, Milton left the university with the highest possible reputation. By his indefatigable study," says Anthony Wood, "he profited exceedingly, and was esteemed to be a sober and virtuous person, yet not to be ignorant of his own parts." These last words are worth noting. From the very first

there is discernible in Milton a vein of noble selfrespect, and even self-assertion; a conviction of superior power when measured with others; a conscious dedication of his life to noble ends; and a resolution to preserve unstained the purity of his moral being, as essential to the capacity of truly great work in the world, or truly great endeavor of whatever kind.

On going to the university Milton had been destined for the Church. For this purpose he had gone through the usual course of study in rhetoric, logic, and the scholastic philosophy and theology studies, however, which even then he regarded in the main as barren and unprofitable, and on which, as on the whole system of university training, he afterwards looked back with vehement contempt. There is evidence that during the seven years which he spent in Christ's College he led a life of singular intellectual independence, performing his academic tasks duly, but occupying himself with much else of his own choosing. The following is a list of his remaining writings during this period (1625-1632):

I. LATIN. (1.) In prose, the first four of his Familiar Epistles, written in 1625 and 1628, and addressed to Thomas

Young and Alexander Gill the younger; and seven college themes or orations on various subjects written between 1626 and 1632, and first published by him, along with his Familiar Epistles, in 1674, under the title of Prolusiones quædam Oratoria. (2.) In verse, thirteen pieces, chiefly on incidents of his university life; to wit, the seven pieces in the elegiac metre which form his Elegiarum Liber, and the first six pieces of his so-called Sylvarum Liber.

II. ENGLISH. Thirteen poems, longer or shorter, as follows:-On the Death of a Fair Infant dying of a Cough, 1626, the infant being the poet's niece, the daughter of his sister Anne, who in 1624 or 1625 had married Edward Philips from Shrewsbury, who held a situation in the Crown Office, London; part of a Vacation Exercise at College, 1628; The Hymn on the Nativity, 1629; On the Passion, 1630; On Time, 1630; On the Circumcision, 1630; At a Solemn Musick, 1630; On May Morning, 1630; On Shakspeare, 1630; On the University Carrier (Hobson), "who sickened in the time of his vacancy (January 1630-1), being forbid to go to London by reason of the plague;" Another on the same; An Epitaph on the Mar chioness of Winchester, 1631; Sonnet on his twenty-third birthday, 1631.

No one can read these juvenile compositions now without discerning in them ample promise of what Milton became. The English poems are best known; and in one or two of them as in that on the Fair Infant and that on Christ's Nativity there is evidence of true poetic genius and of the most exquisite skill in words and verse. But it is in the less-read Latin compositions, perhaps, that the leading traits in the character of the young poet are best exhibited. There, while we admire the strong understanding, and a command of the Latin tongue in comparison with which the usual classical Latinity of modern scholars is forced and feeble, and while also, even in the cumbrous element of the Latin, we discern the graceful winging of the poetic muse, we see at the same time, better than we can see in the

English poems, the habitually grave and austere tone of Milton's mind from his earliest youth,

its tendency, on the one hand, to scorn, and a kind of ferocity of disgust and reprobation; and on the other, to high ideal views and contemplations such as enter only the spirits of the sublime. Nowhere else in the range of juvenile writing known to us is there such distinct evidence of what Horace has called the "os magna soniturum,” the mouth formed for great utterances. The very heaviness of such attempts as there are at the facetious and the humorous proves that it was not in these that Milton was fitted to excel. "Festivitates et sales," he says himself in one of the pieces, "in quibus perexiguam agnosco facultatem meam." In other words, the basis of his character was a moral austerity inconsistent with mere frolic or frivolity, though not inconsistent with the free exercise, on the one hand, of a powerful and inquisitive intellect, or, on the other, of a fantasy delighting in the minutest forms of the musical and the graceful.

It is to be remembered that, though Milton had the compositions above mentioned in manuscript before leaving Cambridge, none of them was published prior to that time, except the Epitaph on Shakspeare. It appeared anonymously among the laudatory verses prefixed to the second folio Shakspeare in 1632; and it is interesting to know that Milton's first appearance in print was on such an occasion. He was then in his twenty-fourth year. According to his original intention, he would about this time have been passing from college to some country curacy; and one can hardly help speculating as to what might have been the result for the Church of England had he done so. A Milton among the ecclesiastics of the days of Laud would have been a phenomenon of

some interest. Long ere leaving college, however, he had abandoned the idea of being a clergyman. The reason was his jealous concern for his intellectual and religious freedom, a state of mind for which the condition of the Church of England under the ascendency of Laud afforded little chance of satisfaction. Whoever would become a clergyman at that time must, he said, "subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could not retch, he must strait perjure himself." He describes himself, therefore, as "church-outed by the prelates," and as having no other prospect left to him than that of a life devoted to study and literature. It says much for the liberality and discretion of his father, that in these circumstances, instead of urging him into a profession against his will, he suffered him to take his own way. Till he was thirty-one years of age, Milton did not earn a penny for himself.

The five years of Milton's life which followed his leaving college (1632-1637) were spent by him at Horton in Buckinghamshire, about twenty miles from London, whither his father had retired in his old age after giving up business.

These

five years, according to his own account, were spent in complete literary leisure and the enjoyment of the quiet rural beauty of the neighborhood; not but that sometimes he "exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books or for that of taking lessons in music or mathematics." During this time, he says, he turned over the Greek and Latin writers; doubtless also the Italian, French, and English; and there is proof also that he entertained for a time the notion of studying law along with his

younger brother Christopher, who had adopted the law as his profession. Of his literary assiduity during the same period there is ample evidence in a long list of subjects for dramas and other poems, drawn out by him in the course of his miscellaneous reading, and now preserved, with others of his manuscripts, in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his actual and surviving writings during this period the following is a list:

I. Three Latin Familiar Epistles, the first dated 1634, and addressed to Alexander Gill the Younger, and the other two dated September, 1637, and addressed to Charles Diodati. Possibly also a scrap or two of Latin verse.

II. The following well-known English poems:

1. The Sonnet to the Nightingale; and possibly one or two

other sonnets.

2. The two exquisite companion poems L'Allegro and Il Penseroso.

3. "Arcades; part of an entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby at Harefield by some noble persons of her family, who appear on the scene in pastoral habit." The Dowager Countess of Derby here alluded to was the same lady who, in her youth, forty years before, had, under the name of Amaryllis, been the theme of Spenser's song. After the death of her first husband, Lord Strange, who succeeded his father as Earl of Derby in 1594, she had married the Lord Keeper, afterwards Lord Chancellor, Egerton, by whose death in 1617 she was left a widow for the second time. She lived at Harefield House, near Uxbridge, where she frequently had her younger relatives about her, including the Earl of Bridgewater, her second husband's eldest son, who had married one of her daughters by her first husband. It has been supposed that this venerable lady and her family had discovered the poetic talent of Milton, and had him frequently with them as a favored guest; but the more probable supposition is, that the young people of her family, having resolved, according to the custom of the time, to get up a masque or musical entertainment in her honor, Milton wrote the words of the Arcades to oblige his intimate friend Henry Lawes the musician, who had been charged with the arrangements. The date of the entertainment was 1633 or 1634; and Arcades was therefore written when Milton was in his twentysixth year.

4. Comus; a masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634,