CHAPTER III.

MILTON AT CAMBRIDGE

The schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician's son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him.

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver--Hobson--drove from the Bull's Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentleman intent on hiring a nag, that "Hobson's choice" meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern visitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts bequeathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town.[1]

Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bainbrigge, Milton became a "lesser pensioner" in February, 1624, at Christ's College. Students were classified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called "sizars," who had inferior accommodation; he probably paid about L50 a year for his maintenance. Christ's College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen colleges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His portrait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining-hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge,--his "On the Cam,"--thus sums up his estimate of the Protector: "Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of God rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell." A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell's name in the college books: "_Hic fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus_;" and it is as "impostor" and "butcher" that two-thirds of Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man.

Emmanuel College is preeminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regicide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St. Botolph's Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop's, which had changed its earlier names of "Shawmut" and "Trimountaine" to "Boston" before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbarous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton's successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ's. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in the _Mayflower_ who had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other English refugees at Leyden.

It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of states and of the architects of national constitutions and ideals.

Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home--Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden.

It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two-thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Maurice, "the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long."

Sidney Sussex, Christ's, and Emmanuel Colleges were erected during the Tudor period, Christ's College, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. The buildings of the latter now present a more commonplace appearance than when the "Lady of Christ's," as the students called young Milton, walked among them in his cap and gown. One still may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room, with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where Milton lived, and which probably he shared with a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor will note its two windows opposite each other, whose heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and cornice, bear mark of age.

No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exquisite green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and trees make the spot seem a paradise regained.

Among the students of Christ's College, none in later years brought it such renown as two men of widely differing types--the authors of "Evidences of Christianity" and "The Origin of Species." William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty-three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day forms part of the subjects required for the "Little Go." Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the nineteenth century, entered Christ's with the intention of studying for the ministry. He left it to journey on the _Beagle_ through the southern seas, and to bring back results which, with his later study, led to such a revolution in human thought as made it only second to that wrought in the minds of men who lived a generation before Milton was born.

Masson tells us that in Milton's college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o'clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students' own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Holbein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors.

After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended evening service, they could do much as they pleased otherwise. In Milton's day, the rule of an earlier time, which prescribed that out of their chambers students should converse in some dead language, had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarous Latin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this prescription must have caused, finally rendered it a dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other forbidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was nevertheless a daily practice.

In many colleges the undergraduates wore "new fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in hanging sleeves; and their other garments light and gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stockings of divers colours reversed one upon another." Some had "fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their shoulders, and long, large merchants' ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist."

The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious apartment used by the dons at Christ's College, shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate withal, for he was used to daily sword practice.

Corporal punishment was then still in vogue, and delinquents under eighteen years old were not infrequently chastised in public. In fact, at Trinity College, "there was a regular service of corporal punishment in the hall every Thursday evening at seven in the presence of all the undergraduates." Masson discredits the story that Milton was once subjected to corporal punishment.

In Milton's day the old order was changing, and we note that on Fridays men ate meat, and that the clergy indulged in impromptu prayers, to the scandal of the good churchmen. It was complained that "they lean or sit or kneel at prayers, every man in a several posture as he pleases; at the name of Jesus, few will bow, and when the Creed is repeated, many of the boys, by men's directions, turn to the west door."

Milton seems to have attended plays at the university, and to have been a critical observer. Toland quotes him as saying: "So many of the young divines and those in next aptitude to Divinity have been seen so often on the stage writhing and unboning their Clergy Lims to all the antic and dishonest Gestures of Trinculos, Buffoons, and bands; prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having, to the eyes of Courtiers and Court Ladies, with their grooms and Mademoiselles. There where they acted and overacted among other young 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 Atticisms, they were out and I hist."

It is the boast of Cambridge that she educated Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley, the three martyrs whom Oxford burned. It must likewise be noted that Erasmus, Spenser, Coke, Walsingham, and Burleigh were Cambridge men.

The Cambridge of Milton's time was but a small town of seven thousand inhabitants, about one-sixth of its present size, but rich with a history of nearly six hundred years. Its most beautiful building then as now was King's College Chapel--in fact, the most beautiful building in either Oxford or Cambridge, despite Mr Ruskin's just criticism upon it. No doubt, it would look less like a dining-table bottom-side up, with its four legs in air, were two of its pinnacles omitted; doubtless also the same criticism on its monotonous decoration of the alternate rose and portcullis, which we made in regard to the Chapel of Henry VII., is here applicable. But its great length, its noble proportions, its rare rich windows, its splendid organ-screen--old in Milton's college days--must appeal to every lover of beauty. One loves to think of the young poet musing here upon those well-known lines in "Il Penseroso" which this stately building may have inspired.

"But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high, embowered roof, With antick pillars massy proof, And storied windows, richly dight, Casting a dim religious light. There let the pealing organ blow, To the full voiced Quire below, In service high and anthem clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear Dissolve me into ecstasies, And bring all heaven before mine eyes."

In King's Chapel Queen Elizabeth attended service several times, and listened with delight to a Latin sermon from the text "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers." On the afternoon of the same Sunday she returned to the antechapel and witnessed a play of Plautus.

Among many buildings which were very old even in Milton's time must be mentioned the church of St. Benedict on Bene't Street, which was once the chapel of Corpus Christi College. Its ancient tower is especially noteworthy. Its little double windows are separated by a baluster-shaped column. The tower is similar to one at Lincoln, and, with the whole structure, antedates the Norman conquest.

A generation before Milton's time Robert Browne, the father of Congregationalism, drew great crowds within this venerable edifice to listen to his radical doctrine. At Cambridge, where he had studied, he became impressed with the perfunctoriness and worldliness of the Church of his time, and he resolved to "satisfy his conscience without any regard to license or authority from a bishop."

When the Pilgrim Fathers fled from Austerfield and Scrooby in 1608, it was as Brownists or Separatists that they went to Holland. They sought a refuge where they might worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, without interference of bishop or presbyter. It was Browne's doctrine, not only of the absolute separation of Church and state, but also of the independence of each individual congregation, that laid the foundation of church government in New England. Presbyterianism has gained little root east of the Hudson. After Browne had suffered for his faith in thirty of the dismal dungeons of that day, and, shattered in mind by his suffering, had recanted and returned to Mother Church, his disciples remained true to the light that he had shown them; the generation of scholars with whom Milton talked at Cambridge were as familiar with Browne's doctrine as the present generation is with that of Maurice and Martineau, and Milton must have been much influenced by it.

Opposite St. John's Chapel is the little round church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest of the four churches in England built by the Templars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple church in London, and was probably begun a little later than St. Benedict's, which has just been mentioned. It is questionable whether the students of Milton's college days appreciated the beauty of this beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which Cambridge boasts many examples.

In Milton's time the most beautiful quadrangle in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect, Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group of older buildings. In the centre of the court is Neville's fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine example of good English Renaissance work. During four years of Milton's residence, part of St. John's College was in process of erection in the Italian Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date, 1624, are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknown to Milton when he mused beside its shady banks where

"Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow, His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe."

Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more than an island in the Fens. Many a time during his seven years in the university town must Milton have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson's horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern dominate the little town that clusters around it, and may be seen from far across the plain.

During these studious years, while Milton walked among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as students, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, and the literature of half a dozen living and dead languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John Eliot's imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In one letter he mentions the execution of a child but nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourge of the plague afflicted London on the year that he entered Cambridge, and five years later he was driven from town by its devastation there. The university ceased all exercises, and the few members of it that remained shut themselves in as close prisoners. So great was the poverty and suffering incident to this calamity, that the king appealed to the country for aid to the stricken town.

During these years of quiet growth, Milton's first noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, according to good judges, deserve the preference. We here mention only some of his English poems. The longest of these, which was written the month and year when he came to his majority, was begun on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of twenty-one longed to give "a birthday gift for Christ," and thus appeared his poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity." Three or four years earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, Mrs. Philips's child, his lines "On the Death of a Fair Infant." The revelation of self in his sonnet "On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three," makes the latter the most interesting of these early flights of song.

The most precious literary treasure which Cambridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, "the most precious manuscript of English literature in the world," is the packet of thirty loose and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton's handwriting, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity College Library. For a generation, they attracted no attention, but later they were examined and handled by so many that they suffered seriously; within fifty years, seventeen lines of "Comus" were torn out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, in a delightful article in the _Atlantic Monthly_, upon "The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge," gives reins to his imagination in picturing the sudden temptation of this man, who, passing down the long ranges of "storied urn and animated bust," which adorn the interior of Wren's famous structure, advances beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant places in his hands the richly bound thin folio,--"and now the devil is raging in the visitor's bosom; the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime is committed.... And so he goes back to his own place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will be discovered ... certain of silent infamy and unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never show to a single friend, can never sell nor give nor bequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not another who so burdens the imagination as this wretched mutilator of 'Comus.'" These pages are the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier creative years. Like Beethoven's note-book, they teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius condescends carefully to note little things and to take infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished from the poet's pen. "How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure!" But the average man, who despairs of ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the creator of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," before he reached the perfect phrase,--"endless morn of light,"--experimented with no less than six others: "ever-endless light," "ever glorious," "uneclipsed," "where day dwells without night," and "in cloudless birth of night." The authorities of Trinity College, having of late realised the invaluable service to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet's workshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the Milton manuscripts. "Now, for the first time," as Mr. Gosse remarks, "we can examine in peace, and without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the priceless thing in its minutest features." When it is remembered that no line of Shakespeare's remains in his own handwriting, and nothing of any consequence of Chaucer's or Spenser's, Mr. Gosse cannot be accused of over-statement when he says that to all lovers of literature this volume is "a relic of inestimable value. To those who are practically interested in the art of verse, it reads a more pregnant lesson than any other similar document in the world."

Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puritans, but one to its poets--Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, who have enriched it by their presence, and have made Cambridge _par excellence_ the university of the poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and Shakespeare were not university men.

The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, brighten gray old walls within the "quads," and when the streets are enlivened by three thousand favoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all points of interest are accessible, and perchance one may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, worn stone stairways into some student's cosy study; the visitor will find it lined with books, rackets, and boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and photographs of some one else's sister. Bits of college gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist's hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and in search for the tombs of eminent founders.

Even if one is a tourist and not a "fresher," he will find it profitable to study contemporary Cambridge through "The Fresher's Don't," written by "A Sympathiser, B. A.," and addressed to freshers "in all courtesy." As to dress, the "fresher," among other pieces of sage advice, is told: "Don't forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with the board. Only graduates wear long tassels."

"Don't wear knickerbockers with cap and gown, nor carry a stick or umbrella. These are stock eccentricities of Fresherdom." (The genuine Cambridge student would rather be soaked to his skin and risk pneumonia, than encounter the derisive grin which an umbrella would evoke.)

"Don't aspire to seniority by smashing your cap or tearing your gown, as you deceive no one."

"Don't be a tuft-head. The style is more favoured by errand boys than gentlemen."

"Don't by any chance sport a tall hat in Cambridge. It will come to grief."

Under other headings, the following injunctions may be selected:

"Don't sport during your first month. You will only earn the undesirable appellation of 'Smug.'"

"Don't speak disrespectfully of a man 'Who only got a third in his Trip., and so can't be very good.' Before you go down your opinion will be 'That a man must be rather good to take the Trip. at all.'"

"Don't mistake a Don for a Gyp. The Gyp is the smarter individual."

"Don't forget that St. Peter's College is 'Pot-House,' Caius is 'Keys,' St. Catherine's is 'Cats,' Magdalene is 'Maudlen,' St. John's College Boat Club is 'Lady Margaret,' and a science man is taking 'Stinks.'"

"Don't forget that Cambridge men 'keep' and not 'live.'"