throughout, and there is some reason for suspecting that he did not get on well with his first tutor, the Rev. William Chappell, the same who was afterwards promoted by the patronage of Laud first to the office of provost of Trinity college, Dublin, then to the bishopric of Cork, and who is thought by some to be the author of "The Whole Duty of Man." Aubrey has even left it on record that the great coming opponent of monarchy and episcopacy was actually subjected to the indignity of personal chastisement at the hands of the future Laudian. It is known that, at any rate, he was after his first year transferred, somewhat irregularly it would seem, to another tutor, Mr. Nathaniel Tovey. But all this, it is evident, soon blew over and was forgotten. Milton has himself, in a tract published in 1642, explicitly contradicted the charge that he had been expelled from the university; and in his "Defensio Secunda," 1652, he thus sums up the history of his whole residence at Cambridge (to adopt Mr. Masson's literal rendering of the passage):—"There for seven years I studied the learning and arts wont to be taught, far from all vice and approved by all good men, even till, having taken what they call the master's degree, and that with praise, I . . . of my own accord went home, leaving even a sense of my loss among most of the fellows of my college, by whom I had in no ordinary degree been regarded."
He had undoubtedly when he quitted college made up his mind against entering the church—"the church, to whose service," he says in one of his tracts, "by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child." And his father, apparently, was soon brought to assent to this abandonment of the young man's original views. The scrivener had by this time retired from business, and the family were residing in a country house they had taken in the quiet little village of Horton in Buckinghamshire. Here Milton passed the next five years in all the luxury of perfect literary leisure. "At my father's country residence," he writes in the "Defensio Secunda," "whither he had retired in his old age, I, with every advantage of leisure, spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin writers; not but that sometimes I exchanged the country for the town, either for the purpose of buying books, or for that of learning something new in mathematics or in music, in which sciences I then delighted." It was in this interval that he produced, among other compositions, his exquisite companion pieces of "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," his "Arcades," and his "Comus." He lost his mother in the beginning of April, 1637; she lies under a stone, on which her name and the date are still to be read, laid flat on the floor of the chancel of Horton church. In August of the same year occurred the death, at the age of twenty-five, of his friend Edward King, son of Sir John King the Irish secretary, lost at sea off the coast of Wales in crossing to Ireland, the subject of his "Lycidas," the most melodious and brilliant of lamentations. Soon after this, as he tells us himself in the continuation of the passage last quoted, being desirous of seeing foreign lands, and especially Italy, he made arrangements to go abroad with one servant, having, as he expresses it, by entreaty obtained his father's consent. Mr. Masson has found reason for believing that the marriage of his younger brother in all probability took place a short time before this; and that the young couple (Christopher was only three-and-twenty, and had not yet been called to the bar), having nothing so far as appears, sought and found a home in the first instance in the house at Horton, so that the old man, when his eldest son set out on his continental tour, would not be left alone.
Milton was abroad from April, 1638, till July or August, 1639. Staying only a few days in Paris, where, however, he met Grotius, he proceeded to Italy by the way of Nice, and visited successively Genoa, Leghorn, Pisa, and Florence, where he spent the months of August and September and made the acquaintance of Galileo; thence he went on by the way of Siena to Rome, and then, after staying there about six weeks, to Naples, where he was towards the end of the year when he received the news of the great movements in Scotland that had followed upon the proceedings of the general assembly held at Glasgow in November, and immediately determined to return to England, foregoing his original intention of extending his travels to Greece. He spent two months more, however, on his way back in Rome, and about the same time in a second visit to Florence; and then, making a circuit by Lucca, Bologna, and Ferrara to Venice, returned westwards by Verona, Milan, and Geneva, whence he took his way directly home through France by Lyons and Paris. With great advantages of person, in addition to his genius and accomplishments, Milton won the admiration of the Italian literati wherever he appeared. He has himself handed down to us some of the poetical encomiums addressed to him, which in one of his English prose tracts he remarks were such as "the Italian is not forward to bestow on men of this side the Alps." At the same time he had never consulted his safety by a cowardly concealment of his opinions, or sought either his own gratification or the applause of others by any unworthy compliances. "I again take God to witness," he says in the "Defensio Secunda," "that in all those places, where so many things are considered lawful, I lived sound and untouched from all profligacy and vice, having this thought perpetually with me, that, though I might escape the eyes of men, I certainly could not the eyes of God." It was not merely in the fervour of poetic inspiration that some seven or eight years before this he had written, in the solemn close of his sonnet, of the talent wherewith he had been intrusted by heaven—
" All is if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-master's eye."
Up to this time, when he had reached his thirty-second year, Milton does not appear, as Mr. Masson remarks, to have earned a penny for himself. He had, doubtless, wasted nothing; but the necessary expenses of an education, a better than which he could not have had if he had been born a prince, had all been defrayed on a handsome scale, and therefore, we may presume, without grudging, by his father, although the kind old man, it is to be feared, had also at the same time to bear the burden of the maintenance of his second son with his wife and an increasing family. In these circumstances Milton proceeded to enter upon a course of life for himself by hiring apartments in St. Bride's Church Yard, Fleet Street, London, in the house of a tailor named Russell, and there undertaking the education of his sister's two sons, little boys of ten and nine years of age. In a year's time, we are told, he made them able to interpret a Latin author at sight. Soon after he removed to a larger house in Aldersgate Street, situated in a garden, and there received more pupils, the sons of some of his friends. But it was not for this that he had been irresistibly drawn home by the first distinct sounds of the great awakening and uprising that was about to shake his native land. The course of proceedings which ended in the overthrow of the established order both of the church and of the state had not been well begun by the Long parliament, when Milton threw himself into the fray by the publication of an attack upon episcopacy in a tract entitled "Of Reformation, in two books." This was followed the same year by another treatise entitled "Of Prelatical Episcopacy," in reply to Bishop Hall and Archbishop Usher; and that by a third, of a more elaborate character than either of its predecessors, entitled "The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, in two books." Another piece in the same strain entitled "An Apology for Smectymnuus"—that is, a defence of a pamphlet published by Edmund Calamy, his old tutor Thomas Young, and other three puritan ministers, who had assumed that designation from the initials of their names—followed the next year. But in 1643 he married; and, although it is not usual for authors to be regulated in their choice of subjects by such a circumstance, this event speedily both gave a new direction to his studies and furnished him with a new topic for his pen. His wife was Mary, daughter of Richard Powell, a landed gentleman who lived at Forest Hill, near Milton's ancestral Shotover, in Oxfordshire. Strange as it seems, it was a royalist family with which the fierce anti-churchman thus connected himself. The result was that the lady soon got tired of the little gaiety and amusement she found in her husband's house, and, having been permitted by him to pay a visit to her father, refused to return. Milton took his course at once with characteristic decision. He forthwith published, in the course of the years 1644 and 1645, four successive treatises in assertion of the right of a husband to divorce his wife of his own authority, whether for adultery or simply for desertion. Nor did he stop here. He actually proceeded, we are assured, to pay his addresses to another lady, described as of great wit and beauty, the daughter of a Dr. Davies. This, however, effectually alarmed his wife or her friends; and, a meeting having been brought about between them, at which she fell upon her knees and begged his forgiveness, Milton, who was less stern in nature than in principle, was easily induced to take her back. She continued to live with him till her death, in childbed, probably in 1653; having borne him three daughters, who
