e would be nothing
surprising if the first rudiments of knowledge were also instilled by
him. Poetry he may have taught by precept, but the one extant specimen
of his Muse is enough to prove that he could never have taught it by
example.

We have therefore to picture Milton growing up in a narrow street amid a
strict Puritan household, but not secluded from the influences of nature
or uncheered by melodious recreations; and tenderly watched over by
exemplary parents--a mother noted, he tells us, for her charities among
her neighbours, and a father who had discerned his promise from the very
first. Given this perception in the head of a religious household, it
almost followed in that age that the future poet should receive the
education of a divine. Happily, the sacerdotal caste had ceased to
exist, and the education of a clergyman meant not that of a priest, but
that of a scholar. Milton was instructed daily, he says, both at grammar
schools and under private masters, "as my age would suffer," he adds, in
acknowledgment of his father's considerateness. Like Disraeli two
centuries afterwards (perhaps the single point of resemblance), he went
for schooling to a Nonconformist in Essex, "who," says Aubrey, "cut his
hair short." His own hair? or his pupil's? queries Biography. We boldly
reply, Both. Undoubtedly Milton's hair is short in the miniature painted
of him at the age of ten by, as is believed, Cornelius Jansen. A
thoughtful little face, that of a well-nurtured, towardly boy; lacking
the poetry and spirituality of the portrait of eleven years later, where
the long hair flows down upon the ruff.

After leaving his Essex pedagogue, Milton came under the private tuition
of Thomas Young, a Scotchman from St. Andrews, who afterwards rose to be
master of Jesus College, Cambridge. It would appear from the elegies
subsequently addressed to him by his pupil that he first taught Milton
to write Latin verse. This instruction was no doubt intended to be
preliminary to the youth's entrance at St. Paul's School, where he must
have been admitted by 1620 at the latest.

At the time of Milton's entry, St. Paul's stood high among the schools
of the metropolis, competing with Merchant Taylors', Westminster, and
the now extinct St. Anthony's. The headmaster, Dr. Gill, was an
admirable scholar, though, as Aubrey records, "he had his whipping
fits." His fitful severity was probably more tolerable than the
systematic cruelty of his pred