Milton's piety and lofty principle and massive learning
must have come to him from the Stowmarket Vicar. In our day there is
little chance of a young scholar becoming imbued with Miltonian ideas on
the subject of civil and religious liberty. That sublime genius which
was to sing in immortal verse of

'Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,'

must have owed much to Dr. Young--a debt which the poet acknowledged, as
we have already seen, in no niggardly way. Amongst Milton's Latin
letters is the following, which has been translated by Professor Masson
thus: 'Although I had resolved with myself, most excellent preceptor, to
send you a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers, yet I did
not consider that I had done enough unless I also wrote something in
prose: for, truly, the singular and boundless gratitude of my mind which
your deserts justly claim from me was not to be expressed in that cramped
mode of speech, straitened by fixed feet and syllables, but in a free
oration--nay, rather, if it were possible, in an Asiatic exuberance of
words. To express sufficiently how much I owe you, were a work far
greater than my strength, even if I should call into play all those
commonplaces of argument which Aristotle or that dialectician of Paris
(Ramus) has collected, or even if I should exhaust all the fountains of
oratory. You complain as justly that my letters have been to you very
few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that
I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable, as I rejoice,
and all but exult, at having such a place in your friendship, as that you
should care to ask for frequent letters from me. That I should never
have written to you for over more than three years, I pray you will not
misconceive, but, in accordance with your wonderful indulgence and
candour, put the more charitable construction on it; for I call God to
witness how much, as a father, I regard you, with what singular devotion
I have always followed you in thought, and how I feared to trouble you
with my writings. In sooth, I make it my first care, that since there is
nothing else to commend my letters, that their rarity may commend them.
Next, as out of that most vehement desire after you which I feel, I
always fancy you with me, and speak to you, and beheld you as if you were
present, and so,