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ments were published within ten years after his leaving Cambridge, when the men who might have refuted them, had they been untrue, were most of them living.

The time was to come in which Milton was to side publicly with the Parliament, and to plead for great changes in Church and State, not sparing the universities. When that time came, nothing would be more natural than that his opponents should go back to his university life; and if that season, so rarely faultless in the case of any man, could be made to yield any bit of scandal, not only would the most be made of it, but much more would be grafted upon it. Now it did so happen that in Milton's second year a quarrel took place between him and his tutor, Chappell, and Dr. Bainbridge, the master, was obliged to interfere. The result, it seems, was, Milton was required to absent himself for a season, or that he chose to do so. But the absence was not long. It occurred in the Lent term of 1626, and it did not occasion the loss of a term. When Milton returned, another person, named Tovey, became his tutor.

But on these facts something more has been grounded. Dr. Johnson, with the temper characteristic of his whole criticism on Milton, says, "There is reason to believe that Milton was regarded in his college with no great fondness. That he obtained no fellowship is certain; but the unkindness with which he was treated was not merely negative. I am ashamed to relate what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either university that suffered the public indignity of corporal punishment." Now, we have seen that nothing could be more untrue than the first part of this assumption-viz., that Milton experienced a general unfriendliness from the men of his college; and the other insinuation, which points to a special indignity inflicted upon him, is, in our judgment, equally without foundation. The only apparent evidence in support of this imputation is in one of Aubrey's manuscripts. Writing on the authority of Christopher Milton, Aubrey says that Milton received "some unkindness" from the hands of Chappell; and over the word "unkindness," the words "whipt him," are subsequently interlined. Whence this later account comes no one knows. Beyond a doubt, punishment in that degrading form was still administered both in Cambridge and in Oxford, but much less frequently than in former times, and rarely ever in the case of youths not under sixteen. But in the spring of 1626 Milton was in his eighteenth year! Looking at the case altogether, we are satisfied that we have here one of the many inventions which were flung at a writer who had dared to assail, and with a bold hand, the prejudices and the selfish passions of the generation about him.1

We have abundant evidence that the early life of Milton, while free from any affectation of purity or goodness, as from affectations of all kinds, was a life of seriousness, and of chastity in a high sense of that word. But his seriousness was a manly seriousness; it had no tincture of gloom, nothing of narrowness. His chastity, too, was not only a fact, but a fact sustained, in his case, by views which even pure men might regard as too ideal and mystical to be adapted to a world like ours. In his estimation, failure in that virtue was more culpable in man than in woman, as betraying weakness in the nature that should be the stronger and the nobler. His lines on Hobson the carrier show that he was not without his seasons of playful humour; and his letter to his friend Diodati, in the spring of 1626, shows that while in London he sometimes went to see what was doing in the theatres. At a later time, indeed, being accused by some of his clerical opponents of writing like a person who had been too familiar with the play-house, he deemed it well to bid his censors look at home, in the following terms: "But since there is such necessity in the hearsay of a tira, a periwig, or a vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was there in that, when, in the college, so many of the young divines, and those of next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the stage, writhing and unboning their clerical limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that ministry, which either they had, or were nigh having, to the eyes of the courtiers and court ladies, with their grooms and mademoiselles? There, while they acted and over-acted, 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 Atticism, they were out, and I hissed."1 The reference here seems to be, to the great performance before the king and queen in Cambridge in 1629. The description indicates the kind of taste which Milton would have exacted from the drama; and it gives us a glimpse of the young Milton of Christ's, as he joins, "with other young scholars," in showing his contempt of the blundering performance, until, at last, he hisses them outright.

In fact, though Milton declined the priestly function in the English Church, he was not, in his own conception, the less a priest on that account. The priesthood to which he aspired was the bardic priesthood. The inspiration he sought was that which had come upon the old prophetsan inspiration which might come upon them as laymen, but which raised them to a level with the most sacred themes. In his apprehension, a poet of the order which he hoped to become, should be, must be, a consecrated man. The singer of Bacchanalian songs may be himself Bacchanalian; but a poet who would ascend to things celestial must not be of the earth, earthy. The evil inseparable from our nature may qualify him to depict evil; but if he is to make men feel how awful goodness is, he must have striven hard towards those higher regions of being where goodness rules. In all art, the truly religious element must come from religious men. Genius without sanctity may touch the ark, but it will be but to profane it. However much at home in other regions, if the special faculty for this region be wanting, success will be wanting. In art as in religion, the natural man does not discern spiritual things

The current doctrine is, that men of poetical and artistical power will always be very much the creatures of imagination and sensibility, and, in consequence, will be subject to alternations of elevation or depression in the most capricious forms-even their morals and religion being subject to these laws in their nature, or, rather, to this absence of law. The life of Milton is not the only life of its class which belies this foolish and mischievous doctrine. He not only felt its fallacy, but that feeling became a profound conviction, governing his whole life. By reflection on this matter, he writes, "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem-that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises

^"Dr. Johnson, who was meanly anxious to revive this slander against Milton, as well as some others, had supposed Milton himself to have this flagellation in his mind, and indirectly to confess it, in one of his Latin poems, where, speaking of Cambridge, and declaring that he no longer had any pleasure in the thought of re-visiting that university, he says-

^'Nec duri libet usque minus preferre magistris,

Cæteraque ingenio non subuenda meo.'

This last line the malicious critic would translate 'And other things insufferable to a man of my temper.' But ingenium is properly expressive of the intellectual constitution, whilst it is the moral constitution that suffers degredation from personal chastisement—the sense of honor, of personal dignity, of justice, &c. Indoles is the proper term for this latter idea, and in using the word ingenium there cannot be a doubt that Milton alluded to the dry scholastic disputations, which were shocking and odious to his fine poetical genius. If, therefore, the vile story is still to be kept up in order to dishonor a great man, at any rate let it not in future be pretended that any countenance to such a slander can be drawn from the confessions of the poet himself." De Quincey, Works, xv. 317, 318; Masson's Life of

¹ Apology for Smeetymnuus.