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."
[Illustration: CHRIST'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
A, Chapel; B, Library; C, Dining-Hall; D, Head Master's Rooms; E, Kitchen;
F, Master's Garden; H, Tennis Court.
_From an old engraving._]
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.'"