e only knew her son as the
author of _Comus_, though it is surely a duty to believe that no son
would have poems like _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ in his desk, and not
at least once produce them and read them aloud to his mother. These
poems, though not published till 1645, were certainly composed in his
mother's life. She died before the troubles began, the strife and
contention in which her well-graced son, the poet, the dreamer of all
things beautiful and cultured, the author of the glancing, tripping
measure--

'Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful jollity'--

was destined to take a part, so eager and so fierce, and for which he was
to sacrifice twenty years of a poet's life.

The poet was sent to St. Paul's School, where he had excellent teaching
of a humane and expanding character, and he early became, what he
remained until his sight left him, a strenuous reader and a late student.

'Or let my lamp at midnight hour
Be seen on some high, lonely tower,
Where I may oft outwatch the Bear.'

Whether the maid who was told off by the elder Milton to sit up till
twelve or one o'clock in the morning for this wonderful Pauline realized
that she was a kind of doorkeeper in the house of genius, and blessed
accordingly, is not known, and may be doubted. When sixteen years old
Milton proceeded to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his memory is
still cherished; and a mulberry-tree, supposed in some way to be his,
rather unkindly kept alive. Milton was not a submissive pupil; in fact,
he was never a submissive anything, for there is point in Dr. Johnson's
malicious remark, that man in Milton's opinion was born to be a rebel,
and woman a slave.

But in most cases, at all events, the rebel did well to be rebellious,
and perhaps he was never so entirely in the right as when he protested
against the slavish traditions of Cambridge educational methods in 1625.

Universities must, however, at all times prove disappointing places to
the young and ingenuous soul, who goes up to them eager for literature,
seeing in every don a devotee to intellectual beauty, and hoping that
lectures will, by some occult process--the _genius loci_--initiate him
into the mysteries of taste and the storehouses of culture. And then the
improving conversation, the flashing wit, the friction of mind with
mind,--these are looked for, but hardly found; and the young scholar
groans in spirit, and perhaps does as