Just before Milton quitted Cambridge, his father, then verging on his loth year, had practically retired from his Bread Street business, and had gone to spend his declining years at Horton, Buckinghamshire, not far from Windsor. Here Milton mainly resided for the next six years—from July 1632 to April 1638.
Although, when he had gone to Cambridge, it had been with the intention of becoming a clergyman, that intention had been abandoned. His reasons were that "tyranny had invaded the church," and that, finding he could not honestly subscribe the oaths and obligations required, he "thought it better to preserve a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, begun with servitude and forswearing." In other words, he was disgusted with the system which Laud was establishing and maintaining in the Church of England. Eventually he decided to devote himself to scholarship and literature. There seems to have been some remon strance from his father ; in Milton's poem Ad patrem their agree ment is recorded; Milton had his way. In perfect leisure, and in a pleasant rural retirement, with Windsor at the distance of an easy walk, and London only about 17 m. off, he went through, he tells us, a systematic course of reading in the Greek and Latin classics, varied by mathematics, music, and the kind of physical science we should now call cosmography.
It is an interesting fact that Milton's very first public appear ance in the world of English authorship was in so honourable a place as the second folio edition of Shakespeare in 1632. His enthusiastic eulogy on Shakespeare, written in 163o, was one of three anonymous pieces prefixed to that second folio. Among the poems actually written by Milton at Horton the first, in all probability, after the Latin hexameters Ad patrem, were the exquisite companion pieces L'Allegro and 11 Penseroso. There followed, in or about 1633, the fragment called Arcades. It was part of a pastoral masque performed by the young people of the noble family of Egerton, before the countess-dowager of Derby, at her mansion of Harefield, about io m. from Horton. That Milton contributed the words for the entertainment was, almost certainly, owing to his friendship with Henry Lawes, who supplied the music. Next in order among the compositions at Horton may be mentioned the three short pieces, "At a Solemn Music," "On Time," and "Upon the Circumcision"; after which comes Comus, the largest and most important of all Milton's minor poems. The name by which that beautiful drama is now universally known was not given to it by Milton himself. He entitled it, more simply and vaguely, "A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634, on Michaelmas night, before John Earl of Bridgewater, Lord Presi dent of Wales" (1637). Lawes supplied the music and was stage manager; he applied to Milton for the poetry; and on Sept. 29,
1634, the drama furnished by Milton was performed in Ludlow Castle before a great assemblage of the nobility and gentry of the Welsh principality, Lawes taking the part of "the attendant spirit," while the parts of "first brother," "second brother" and "the lady" were taken by the earl's three youngest children, Vis count Brackley, Mr. Thomas Egerton and Lady Alice Egerton. From Sept. 1634 to the beginning of 1637 is a comparative blank in our records. Straggling incidents in this blank are a Greek translation of "Psalm cxiv.," a visit to Oxford in 1635 and the beginning in May 1636 of a troublesome lawsuit against his father by Sir Thomas Cotton, who accused him of misappropriation. The lawsuit was still in progress when, on April 3, 1637, Milton's mother died, at the age of about sixty-five. The year 1637 was otherwise eventful. It was in that year that his Comas, after lying in manuscript for more than two years, was published by itself, in the form of a small quarto of 35 pages. The author's name was withheld, and the entire responsibility of the publication was assumed by Henry Lawes. Milton seems to have been in London when the little volume appeared. He was a good deal in London, at all events, during the months immediately following his mother's death. The plague, which had been on one of its periodical visits of ravage through England since early in the preceding year, was then especially severe in the Horton neigh bourhood, while London was comparatively free. It was probably in London that Milton heard of the death of Edward King, who had sailed from Chester for a vacation visit to his relatives in Ireland, when, on Aug. 1o, the ship in perfectly calm water struck on a rock and went down, he and nearly all the other passengers going down with her. There is no mention of this event in Milton's two Latin "Familiar Epistles" of September 1637, addressed to his friend Charles Diodati, and dated from London ; but in Nov. 1637, and probably at Horton, he wrote his matchless pastoral monody of Lycidas. It was his contribution to a collection of obituary verses, Greek, Latin and English, inscribed to the memory of Edward King by his numerous friends, at Cambridge and else where. The collection appeared early in 1638. The second part contained thirteen English poems, the last of which was Milton's monody, signed only with his initials "J. M." His Tour Abroad.—Circumstances now favoured his plan for a foreign tour. The Cotton lawsuit was at an end, and Milton's younger brother Christopher had married and gone to live at Horton. Before the end of April 1638 Milton was on his way across the channel, taking one English man-servant with him.