ine of his own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but
always indicates force of character. The poet's grandfather, who lived
in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism
and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and
something of a Puritan. The son went to London, set up in business as
a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and
prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the
country. He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are
found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland
and Orlando Gibbons contributed. His house was no doubt full of music,
as were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries,
and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense
delight in music which appears in all his works. No poet speaks of
music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art. The
untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so
much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of
those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his
soul.

In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the
king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's
European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold
himself, the future author of _Paradise Lost_ went into residence at
Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can
boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he
had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and
evidently made an impression on his contemporaries. No doubt the
strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made
him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with
genius. From the beginning he had the passion of the student. He says
of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before
midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father
"ordered the maid to sit up for him." And his studies were in the main
the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of
them. All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning,
and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business
of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics
and theology, contem