lton
was called "The Lady of Christ's." And it is plain, from his own
references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college,
that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and
great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement
of his manners. He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him
the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those
who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were
hard with holding the plough. He disdains the implied charge of
prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an
effeminate or a coward. No braver man ever held a pen. Wood says {32}
that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage
and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect
daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he
generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match
for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any
one could offer him." Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no
weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then
common at the universities. He says of himself that he had no faculty
for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his
writings. The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in
his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called
practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds
are not capable of joking. This was partly the common fault of an age
whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us
to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the
merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of
Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious
men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent
stimulus. {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of
jests, good or bad. It is evident from his own proud confessions that
he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days,
always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted
with the noblest sort of ambition. He says of himself that, however he
might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt
to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure
thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante.