Milton did--quarrels with his
tutor. But if he is wise he will, as Milton also did, make it up again,
and get the most that he can from his stony-hearted stepmother before the
time comes for him to bid her his _Vale vale et aeternum vale_.

Milton remained seven years at Cambridge--from 1625 to 1632--from his
seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year. Any intention or thought he ever
may have had of taking orders he seems early to have rejected with a
characteristic scorn. He considered a state of subscription to articles
a state of slavery, and Milton was always determined, whatever else he
was or might become, to be his own man. Though never in sympathy with
the governing tone of the place, there is no reason to suppose that
Milton (any more than others) found this lack seriously to interfere with
a fair amount of good solid enjoyment from day to day. He had friends
who courted his society, and pursuits both grave and gay to occupy his
hours of study and relaxation. He was called the 'Lady' of his college,
on account of his personal beauty and the purity and daintiness of his
life and conversation.

After leaving Cambridge Milton began his life, so attractive to one's
thoughts, at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, where his father had a house in
which his mother was living. Here, for five years, from his
twenty-fourth to his twenty-ninth year--a period often stormy in the
lives of poets--he continued his work of self-education. Some of his
Cambridge friends appear to have grown a little anxious, on seeing one
who had distinction stamped upon his brow, doing what the world calls
nothing; and Milton himself was watchful, and even suspicious. His
second sonnet records this state of feeling:

'How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.'

And yet no poet had ever a more beautiful springtide, though it was
restless, as spring should be, with the promise of greater things and
'high midsummer pomps.' These latter it was that were postponed almost
too long.

Milton at Horton made up his mind to be a great poet--neither more nor
less; and with that end in view he toiled unceasingly. A more solemn
dedication of a man by himself to the poetical office cannot be imagined.
Everything about him became, as it were, pontifical, almost sacramental.
A poet's soul must contain the