given a liberal education, and had perhaps studied at Oxford. Love of music was in him already, and he was known as a composer, being one of twenty-five who set to music a series of madrigals in honor of Queen Elizabeth: The Triumphs of Oriana — essentially non-religious music. The scrivener had literary ambitions too, and a sonnet from his pen survives; his modesty and good taste are proved by the fact that he did not try to force the Muse's favors, and desisted after that attempt. His literary ambition centered in his son, and his discernment and disinterestedness cannot be overpraised. He was convinced from the first of the extraordinary merits of his son, and grudged no sacrifice to make him a great man. He had thought of the Church for him, but rather in order to give him an opportunity than out of religious zeal; in the dreams by the family fireside, the young Milton did not appear as a future Calvin, but as a second Homer; and surely here is the most intimate proof that there was nothing of the fanatic about John Milton the father: an over-religious family would have coveted the fame of a reformer for such a richly gifted son; Milton's family brought him up for poetical glory. When Milton decided he could not enter the Church, his father does not seem to have been hard to win over, and he went on allowing the young poet, for culture and travel, the use of a laboriously acquired fortune.

6

The retired business man had a calm and happy old age in his eldest son's house, " without the least trouble imaginable," says Phillips: no sign of violent religious zeal, considering the fact that at the time there lived in the same house the royalist, and possibly Catholic, family 4 Ibid., I, 23. Ibid., I, 51-54. 6 Quoted by Masson, II, 508.

5 of Milton's wife. Besides, this same John Milton, who had left his father's house over a religious quarrel, lived in perfect harmony with his son Christopher for several years -and Christopher was destined to become a Catholic. This family changed religion a little too often; their ideas were evidently broad enough, since Christopher, a royalist, found shelter in his brother's home when the royalist cause was lost; and we do not know that good harmony was ever broken among the three men. All this confirms the hypothesis that what was the matter with this family was not fanaticism, but the need for personal independence. When they agreed to respect each other's rights to think as they liked, they lived quite happily in spite of all their divergences of opinion an impossible thing for fanatics to do.

As for our John Milton, he wrote verses which were considered marvelous in the home circle when he was about ten years old, and he was henceforward brought up deliberately to be a man of genius." What colossal pride must have been latent in a family where such a thing was accepted as normal, where such an enterprise was carried through successfully, to the complete satisfaction of all participants in this unique conspiracy! The habit of looking upon himself as a great man was thus acquired by the poet in early childhood. He came to accept it as a simple and natural thing. His greatness was taken for granted, first of all by himself. During the whole course of his life, he was to make candid and stupendous admissions concerning his own genius. He did not boast of it; it was a natural, well known fact, which needed not to be insisted upon in itself; but it was an Ibid., II, 490, 508.

8 Masson, I, 65.

advantage of which he would deprive neither his cause nor his ideas. The form of his exhortations to the people or to the great was always, more or less: 'Aμǹv åμǹv Xéyw vμīv Verily, I, Milton, say unto you!

Another characteristic of his pride may also have come from its home origin. Milton never clearly perceived that the world was not made of Miltons. Anticipating the Kantian formula, he legislated as though what was valid for him was valid for the universe. He appraised man's powers too high, judging by himself. No doubt this tendency came from the time when he accepted in all good faith his family's cult, and probably believed that every family was similarly educating a young Milton.

II. THE UNIVERSITY AND HORTON

Milton went to Cambridge in 1625. His proud and sensitive nature seems to have been put at first to a severe test. The students were not likely to surround him with the affection of the home circle, and his delicacy must have rebelled against the grossness and indifference of his new companions. Anyhow he succeeded in acquiring neither the good opinion of his teachers, as the quarrel between him and his tutor Chappell proves, nor that of his comrades, as is visible in the opening sentences of the first of his Prolusiones. And yet, when he left the University in 1632, he had conquered: he went regretted by many, admired by all."

This change in public opinion is a sure proof of the amiability of his character: a stiff Puritan, having once made an unfavorable impression, would never have gained his companions' affection. This human side of his nature

9 See Masson, I, 159-61, 276-77, 307.

is evident above all in his friendship with Charles Deodati, a school friend from pre-university days, a precious comrade till his death in 1639, Milton's most intimate friend, it would seem. Their correspondence, in turns gay or serious, is normally in the tone of affectionate banter. The Latin elegy sent to Deodati in 1626 reveals the lighter side of Milton's soul: his love for the stage, and also his intense susceptibility to feminine charm. The poet was good-looking and elegant in his dress; it was in the order of things that he should be himself attracted by beauty. Thus he duly went into raptures over the charms of the London girls. In May 1628 (he was twenty) he was violently in love -so he says in his seventh Latin elegy — with a young girl he had seen by chance in a crowd and would never see again.

These two productions are no doubt, partly at least, literary exercises, full of cold rhetoric and false mythological allusions. Yet they contain some lively traits. First of all, a young Puritan would have avoided the subject altogether. Then the second poem is based on a true incident: the young man caught sight in the street of a beautiful woman, lost as soon as seen; this ordinary happening must have been real, since many less thin subjects were at hand for artificial love poetry. But we have even better proof of Milton's feelings at this period, since the keenest of Milton's biographers, Dr. Smart of Glasgow, has set in their true light the Italian sonnets." These were probably written about Milton's twenty-third year. They are "a record of his first love that is, if we leave out of count the unknown young London girl. “The person addressed in these poems was a lady of Italian

10 The Sonnets of Milton, by John S. Smart (Glasgow, 1921), pp. 133 ff.

descent, having a foreign type of beauty, new to the poet, with a dark complexion and dark eyes.. His regard for her was something more than a passing admiration. It is also evident that she was aware of his feelings, and was not unwilling to make some response; for the sonnets were composed in Italian, rather than English, at her own request, she having said: 'It is the language of love.'"

But there is more in these earliest poems of Milton. With the rise of amorous feeling, there awakens in Milton a marvellous sympathy with Nature, in which he feels and recognizes immense forces of well-nigh voluptuous desire. This feeling was later developed in some of Comus's speeches and fully expressed in the Creation book of Paradise Lost; it then became a sort of sense of universal fruitfulness, which gives life to lines like

Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul.

No other poet has been so close to a feeling of Nature's fecundity, and, as we shall see later, this conception has a high philosophical importance in Milton's subsequent work." Already in his In Adventum Veris (1629) we find the promise of future splendor:

Look, Phoebus; loves, easy to reach, call to thee; the breezes of Spring send forth their prayers sweet as honey. . . . Not without presents does the Earth seek thy love. . . . If precious things, dazzling offerings touch thy soul (for love is often bought with presents), she spreads before thee all the wealth she keeps hidden under the vast seas and inside the mountains.12

United to this exquisite sensibility, from youth through the whole of life, is the mastery of self, especially in that form which appeals most to the imagination of a pure 12 Ll. 67-78.

11 See below, pp. 141-43.