contempt was openly avowed we cannot doubt, or that such an example of insubordination was severely rebuked by the Master, Dr. Bainbridge, a very rigid disciplinarian. I have ventured to offer in another place a probable solution of the disagreement in a very curious passage from the Apology for Smectymnuus :-"There," he says, alluding to the academic performances, "while they acted and overacted, among other scholars I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and, to make up the Atticism, they were out, and I hissed." The passage is paraphrased very closely from the oration of Demosthenes, De Corona. Mr. Mitford conjectures that he may have suffered a temporary rustication, but it is certain that he did not lose a term, which in that case he could hardly have avoided. His anger seems to have been confined to the Master, for he subsequently acknowledged with "allgrateful mind that more than ordinary favour and respect" which he experienced above any of his equals, "at the hands of those courteous and learned men," the fellows of his college; to oblige whom he wrote in 1628 some verses upon the subject, “Naturam non pati senium," full of fancy and grace, and marked by an elevation of sentiment very uncommon at such an age. Having taken his Master's degree, in 1632 he left the university, without animosity, yet with no sentiments of esteem; and many years after, in the ripeness of his judgment, he still remembered with execration the "intellectual abstractions of logic and metaphysics," and the "fathomless depths of controversy." With what different feelings did Cowley contemplate the same scenes! With him Cambridge was the favourite haunt of the Pierian birds; he dwelt with affectionate interest upon its delightful ease and its "learned quiet;" while Milton saw only naked fields without a shadow, and heard only voices "cracked with metaphysical gargarisms." He had already begun to entertain those objections to the established form of the church and her discipline which in later years broke forth with such melancholy violence. His parents designed him for the church, and his reasons for disappointing their expectations may be given in his own words :-"By the intentions of my parents and friends I was destined of a child to the service of the church, and in mine own resolutions. Till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that he would relish, he must either straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." That he was sincere in his scruples no person can doubt who reads the sonnet written in his twentythird year, in which he expresses his resolution to walk conscious of the never-sleeping watchfulness of his "great Task-master's eye." The beautiful elegy addressed to his father displays the ardour of his filial affection, and the extent and variety of his attainments; nor is it less interesting from the allusions it contains to his father's disapproval of his poetical studies: Nec tu perge, precor, sacras contemnere Musas, Nor thou persist, I pray thee, still to slight, And useless powers, by whom inspired, thyself Harmonious. COWPER. and then, in a very charming transition, he exclaims, Te tamen, ut simules teneras odisse Camœnas, No, howsoe'er the semblance thou assume COWPER. He proceeds with affectionate gratitude and enthusiasm to enumerate the instances of his parent's love; that instead of urging his feet into the open and broad path (via lata) which led to wealth and preferment, or devoting him to the "insipid clamours of the bar," he had desired rather to cultivate and enrich his mind; conducting him from the busy tumult of life into the gardens of Attic philosophy, and by the pleasant banks of Aonian streams; and he particularly attributes to his advice the acquisition of the French, Italian, and Hebrew languages. By such a benevolent heart he was welcomed to Horton in Buckinghamshire, where his father was enjoying the fruit of his honourable exertions. In this pleasant retirement, occasionally enlivened by a visit to London, to see his friends and make himself acquainted with anything new in mathematics or music, Milton passed five years. During this period he is reported to have read through all the Greek and Latin writers; an account which Johnson is inclined to receive with limitations. That he read them with any view to verbal or minute criticism, we are not to imagine; but as his principal object was doubtless to imbue his mind with the poetry and eloquence of ancient literature, we can easily conceive that even a smaller degree of ardour than he possessed would have carried him triumphantly through the labour. In one of his Latin poems he speaks of every moment being engrossed by his books. Et totum rapiunt me, mea vita, libri. To his friend Charles Diodati he writes, "It is my way to suffer no impediment, no love of ease, no avocation whatever, to chill the ardour, or break the continuity, or divert the completion of my literary pursuits;" and in another letter to the same correspondent he says, "Do you ask what I am meditating? by the help of heaven, an immortality of fame-but what am I doing? TTEроÓVW; I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air." His wings were not indeed strong enough to bear him into that lofty heaven of invention which he was hereafter to visit, but they had already carried him to the groves of the Muses. At Horton he is believed to have written the Arcades, Comus, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas. The Arcades was represented by the grandchildren of the Countess Dowager of Derby, whose mansion, Harefield Place, was situated in the neighbourhood, and who was herself invested with a poetical lustre as the early patroness and theme of Spenser. But his fancy shone out with intenser brightness in the Masque of Comus, which was performed at Ludlow Castle, the residence of the Earl of Bridgewater, the Lord President of Wales. It was founded on the unpromising incident of a lady and her brothers having been benighted and separated while passing through a forest in Herefordshire. For the fiction he may have been partially indebted to the Old Wives' Tale of George Peele. Kwμos, or Revelry, had been already personified by Eschylus, in one of the noblest passages of the Agamemnon, and Ben Jonson had introduced the character into a masque. But the exquisite melody of the versification, and the delicate sweetness of the imagery, were unborrowed. Equal to the Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher in the music of the rhythm, it surpasses that charming poem in the richness and variety of its style. Everything breathes of the enchanter; the "cedarn alleys" are freshened by celestial breezes, and the flowers are heavy with "Elysian dew." The grace of the lyric measures obtained the praise of Sir Henry Wotton, who expressed himself delighted with what he called "a certain Doric delicacy in the songs and odes." The foreign idioms in which Comus abounds show that Milton's reading was not confined to classical authors. He had already begun with avidity and delight to feast on Dante and Petrarch, and not even the transparent waters of Ilissus, nor the banks of the Tiber, could detain his footsteps from the streams of the Arno, and the hills of Fæsolæ*. The original of the lady in Comus was Alice, the eleventh daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater, and who became the wife of the Earl of Carbery, the patron and friend of Jeremy Taylort. Her picture is preserved at Golden Grove, and is said to display all the dignified beauty to be expected in one in whom was visible the sun-clad power of chastity. Warburton, in a letter to Birch, expressed an opinion that in Comus there exists a brighter vein of poetry, inter See his letter to B. Bonmathæi. + See note (M.) Heber's Life of Taylor, p. 318. |