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the roll of its alumni which embraced the names of the reformer Latimer, the antiquarian Leland, Harrington the translator of that elegant Italian poet Ariosto, and Sir Philip Sidney-a very honorable list.

Christ College was one of the most comfortable, as it was among the largest, in the university. It was substantially built, with a spacious inner quadrangle, a handsome dininghall, and an extensive garden, provided with a bowling-green, a pond, and alcoves; it also possessed shady walks, in true academic taste.

Tradition still points out Milton's rooms. "They were," says Masson, "in the older part of the building, on the left side of the court, as you enter through the street-gate; the first floor rooms on the first stair on that side. The rooms consist at present of a small study, with two windows looking into the court, and a very small bed-room adjoining. They do not seem to have been altered at all since Milton's time." As soon as he had settled himself in his apartments, which he retained until he quitted Cambridge, he selected his tutor, William Chappell, and then strolled out to see the town.

The

At that time the population of Cambridge was between seven and eight thousand. distinction between "town" and "gown" had grown up long prior to that age, and while the town was governed by a mayor, aldermen, and a common council, the University was controlled by its own statutes, which were enforced by the collegiate authorities. The University was also represented in Parliament by two members returned by itself.**

At the time of Milton's matriculation, Cambridge had fallen into many disorders and deviations from the old academic discipline, ecclesiastical and other, arising on the one hand from the invasion of Puritan opinions, which prevailed to an extent which alarmed the zealous churchmen resident there, and on the other hand from "debauched and atheistical" principles, and that "nicknaming and scoffing at religion and the power of godliness," which serious men thought "strange in a University of the reformed church."

Indeed the selfsame conflict between rotten formalism and scoffing infidelity on one

* Masson's Life of Milton, p. 79.

side, and earnest, living, and sincere devotion on the other, which ere long lighted the flames of civil war throughout Great Britain, seems to have already commenced at the University when Milton entered it. In Christ College the order was very good. Its heads and seniors were puritanically inclined, and they imparted to the undergraduates something of their own zeal and piety. Still it is very certain that Milton always entertained a poor opinion of the University curriculum, or course of study. He was at the very outset disgusted by the superficial educational system, and the babel of controversy. In speaking, long afterwards, of boys who went up to the colleges for education, he says, "Their honest and ingenuous natures coming to the University to feed themselves with good and solid learning, are there unfortunately fed with nothing else but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry. They are sent home again with such a scholastic bur in their throats as hath stopped and hindered all true and generous philosophy from entering, cracked their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms;

hath made them admire a sort of formal, outside men, prelatically addicted, whose unchastened and overwrought minds were never yet initiated, nor subdued under the law of moral or religious virtue, which two are the greatest and best points of learning; but either slightly trained up in a sort of hypocritical and hackney course of literature to get their living by, or else fondly overstudied in useless controversies, except those which they use with all the specious subtlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta."

In a letter to his old friend and tutor Alexander Gill, he speaks again of the superficial and smattering course of learning pursued at the University, and of the manner in which the clergy engaged with raw and untutored judgments in the explanation of theological tenets, patching together a sermon with pilfered scraps, without any acquaintance with criticism or philosophy.

As might have been expected, with these views Milton's tarry at Cambridge was not invariably pleasant and agreeable. Himself, though but a boy in years-he was then but

two months turned of sixteen-marvellously and accurately learned, familiar with the French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew tongues, he saw easily beneath the pompous surfaceknowledge of the college "Dons." In familiarity with the current English literature of the day, and with those authors who preceded him, the fossil professors were infinitely behind their strange and intractable pupil.

In the beginning, when they perceived his evident contempt for their time-honored and inflexible methods, they treated him harshly, as a presumptuous and conceited upstart. But in the end they learned to appreciate and admire his genius. Milton was always frank and free in the expression of his opinions, and as he bruited his educational notions abroad, the university authorities set themselves to crush the heresy. He was, in consequence, beset at this time by many vexations. Among other troubles was his famous quarrel with his tutor, William Chappell.

Dr. Johnson, a Tory and a high-churchman, and therefore naturally inimical to Milton's opinions, in his life of the poet, is fre

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