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He did not give any extraordinary evidence during his university life of his splendid poetical talents. Still, a number of his minor poems belong to this period, and especially his very beautiful lines entitled, "On a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough," composed on the death of a daughter of his sister Anne, who had married a Mr. Philips-which are as undying as the English language. It was, however, as a profound, elegant scholar and young man of rare purity and promise, that he was at this time most famed.

Having completed his full course, Milton finally quitted Cambridge in July, 1632, he being then in his twenty-fourth year, ripe in wisdom and in honors.

In his personal appearance, Milton was at this time singularly prepossessing. He had acquired in college the nickname of "the lady," on account of his delicate complexion, his hair flowing to his ruff on both sides of his oval face, and his slender and elegant, rather than massive or powerful form. But there was nothing effeminate in his demeanor. He had long auburn hair, beautiful and curling,

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an exceedingly fair complexion, an oval face," and dark grey eyes. His deportment was affable, his gait erect and manly, bespeaking courage and undauntedness. Milton himself tells us that in his youth he did not neglect "daily practice" with his sword, and that he was not so very slight, though he was lithe and a trifle below the middle height; but that "armed with it, as he generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match for any one, even were he much the most robust, and of being perfectly at his ease as to any injury that any one could offer him, man to man."

Such was John Milton when, at the age of twenty-four, he left his little college world to step out into that broader and grander arena in which God meant him to play so prominent and useful a part.

CHAPTER IV.

MILTON, upon leaving Cambridge, repaired at once to his father's house, now however no longer in Bread-street, but at a villa which his father had taken at some distance from the bustling metropolis. "At "At my father's country residence," he himself informs us, "whither he had retired to pass his old age, I, with every advantage of leisure, spent a complete holiday in turning over the Greek and Latin authors; 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."

The new residence of the scrivener Milton was situated in the hamlet of Horton, near Colnbrook, in Buckinghamshire, and was but about seventeen miles from London, within easy distance for young Milton's occasional trips to town. The little village, containing at that time but few families, was quiet and very

beautiful-one of those sweet old English towns in which we desire to lie down and dreamprecisely the nook for a speculative thinker or a poet. It was scatteringly built, the houses playing at hide-and-seek among the trees and intervening foliage, with no continuous streets, but only a great tree in the centre of an open space where three roads met and suggested that there might be more habitations about the spot than at first appeared, which suggestion was confirmed on looking down one of the roads, by the sight of an old churchtower, ivy covered, and with a cemetery in front, which you entered between two extremely old yew-trees. Here it was that Milton, together with other members of his family, worshipped regularly for five years, or during his residence in the hamlet.

One could lie under the elm-trees in the lawn, saunter through the green meadows by the rippling streamlet, from a rustic bridge watch the lazy mill-wheel, or walk along quiet roads well hedged, deviate into by-paths leading past farm-yards and orchards, or through rich pastures where horses, cows, and sheep

were wont to graze-an elysium indeed for the weary Londoner, a 'paradise regained' for the younger Milton.

Milton had been designed both by his father and his own wish for the church, when he went to Cambridge; but long before he acquired his degree he had abandoned the intention. This resolution was owing to his conscientious scruples against signing the Articles, and endorsing the doctrine and discipline of the English church. "The church," he says, "to whose service, by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child, and in my own resolutions till, coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the church-that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either perjure or split his faith-I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing."

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In order to account for this reluctance on

* Reason of Church Government, (1641,) Works, III. p. 150.

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