John Milton

MILTON, JOHN English poet, was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, London, on Dec. 9, 1608. His father, John Milton of Bread Street, scrivener, was himself an interest ing man. He was the son of a staunch Roman Catholic, and turned Protestant at Oxford, for which he was disinherited. How he supported himself in London at first is obscure; perhaps his musical abilities helped him. He was about 37 when he became qualified early in 1600. He then set up at the Spread Eagle, Bread Street, and married Sarah Jeffrey; John Milton the younger was the second of their children who survived infancy.

Education.

When Milton was ten years old he had as tutor Thomas Young, afterwards master of Jesus college, Cambridge; he stayed till 1622, but before then Milton had already started to go to St. Paul's. Mu4ic was a natural part of his home environ ment, as his father was of some note in the musical world. Milton's chief friend at school was Charles Diodati, who left to go to Oxford in 1623. Milton stayed till Milton had then all but completed his 16th year, and was as scholarly, as accomplished and as handsome a youth as St. Paul's school had sent forth. We learn from himself that his exercises "in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter," had begun to attract attention even in his boyhood. Of these poems the only specimens that now remain are two copies of Latin verses, preserved in a commonplace book of his (printed by the Camden Society in 1877), and his "Paraphrase on Psalm cxiv." and his "Paraphrase on Psalm cxxxvi." At the age of 16 Milton was entered as a student of Christ's college, Cambridge, in the grade of a "Lesser Pensioner," and he matriculated two months later, on April 9,1625. At least three students who entered Christ's after Milton, but during his residence, deserve mention.

One was Edward King, a youth of Irish birth and high Irish con nections, who entered in 1626, at the age of fourteen; another was John Cleveland, afterwards known as royalist and satirist, who entered in 1627; and the third was Henry More, subsequently famous as the Cambridge Platonist, who entered in 1631, just before Milton left. Milton's own brother, Christopher, joined him in the college in February 1630/31, at the age of fifteen.

Milton's academic course lasted seven years and five months, bringing him from his 17th year to his twenty-fourth. In his sec ond year he quarrelled with his tutor, Chappell. Johnson's sug gestion that Milton may have been one of the last students to suffer corporal punishment deserves no credit ; all we know is that he left college for a time and was transferred on his return to the tutorship of Nathaniel Tovey. For the first two or three years

of his undergraduateship, he was generally unpopular among the younger men of his college. They had nicknamed him "the Lady" —a nickname which the students of the other colleges took up, converting it into "the Lady of Christ's"; and, though the allu sion was chiefly to the peculiar grace of his personal appearance, it conveyed also a sneer at what the rougher men thought his unusual prudishness, the haughty fastidiousness of his tastes and morals. A change in this state of things had certainly occurred before January 1628/29, when, at the age of 20, he took his B.A. degree. By that time his intellectual pre-eminence had come to be acknowledged. In July 1632 Milton took his M.A. degree. Tradition still points out Milton's rooms at Christ's college. They are on the first floor on the first stair on the north side of the great court.

Early Writings.

Of Milton's skill at Cambridge, specimens remain in his Prolusiones quaedam oratoriae. They consist of seven rhetorical Latin essays, generally in a whimsical vein, de livered by him, either in the hall of Christ's college or in the public university schools. To Milton's Cambridge period belong four of his Latin "Familiar Epistles," and the greater number of his preserved Latin poems, including : (I) the seven pieces, written in 1626, which compose his Elegiarum liber, two of the most interesting of them addressed to his friend, Charles Diodati, and one to his former tutor, Young, in his exile at Hamburg; (2) the five short Gunpowder Plot epigrams, now appended to the Elegies; and (3) the first five pieces of the Sylvarum liber, the most important of which are the hexameter poem "In quintum novembris" (1626), and the piece entitled Naturarn non pati seniurn (1628). Of the English poems of the Cambridge period the following is a dated list : "On the Death of a fair Infant" (1625-1626), the subject being the death of the first-born child of his sister Anne Phillips; "At a Vacation Exercise in the College" (1628); the magnificent Christmas ode, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity" (1629) ; the fragment called "The Passion" and the "Song on May Morning," both probably belonging to 1630; the poem. "On Shakespeare," certainly belonging to that year, printed in the Shakespeare folio of 1632; the two facetious pieces "On the University Carrier" (1630-1631) ; the "Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester" (1631) ; the sonnet "To the Nightingale," probably of the same year; the sonnet "On arriving at the Age of twenty-three," dating itself certainly in December 1631.