reater part of his time and study was devoted to
the classics, the instrument that he was to use was learned in a native
school. His metre, his magnificent vocabulary, his unerring phraseology,
took learning and practice. He attached a high value to his study of
English poetry. When he spoke of "our sage and serious Spenser (whom I
dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)," he was
conscious that he was maintaining what seemed a bold paradox in an age
when scholasticism still controlled education. It is pleasant to think of
Milton during these early years, whether in London or at Christ's
College, in his "calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and
confident thoughts," before ever he had a hint that he must perforce
"embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from
beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of
delightful studies." From the first, we may be sure, he read the poets as
one poet reads another, and apprenticed himself to them for their craft.
He was never drawn out of the highroad of art by the minuter and more
entangling allurements of scholarship. In one of his Divorce pamphlets he
tells, with the inevitable touch of pride, how he never could delight in
long citations, much less in whole traductions, "whether it be natural
disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of
what God made mine own, and not a translator."

Milton was intended by his family, and by his own early resolves, for the
service of the Church. The growing unrest, therefore, in matters
ecclesiastical during the early part of the seventeenth century could not
but affect him. The various parties and tendencies in the Church of
England had never, since the Reformation, attained to a condition of
stable equilibrium. But the settlement under Elizabeth was strengthened,
and the parties bound together for thirty years, by the ever-present fear
of Rome. When that fear was allayed, and the menace that hung over the
very existence of the nation removed by the defeat of the Armada, the
differences within the Church broke out afresh, and waxed fiercer every
year. Shakespeare grew to manhood during the halcyon years between the
Marian persecutions and the Marprelate pamphlets--a kind of magic oasis,
which gave us our English Renaissance. Milton's youth breathed a very
different air. The Church, as it was, pleased hardly any party. Much of
the old temple had