the date, which is all important.  We must picture Milton “affable, erect, and manly,” as Wood describes him, speaking from a low pulpit in the hall of Christ’s College, to an audience of various standing, from grave doctors to skittish undergraduates, with most of whom he was in daily intercourse.  The term is the summer of 1628, about nine months before his graduation; the words were Latin, but we resort to the version of Professor Masson:—­

“Then also there drew and invited me, in no ordinary degree, to undertake this part your very recently discovered graciousness to me.  For when, some few months ago, I was about to perform an oratorical office before you, and was under the impression that any lucubrations whatsoever of mine would be the reverse of agreeable to you, and would have more merciful judges in Aeacus and Minos than almost any of you would prove, truly, beyond my fancy, beyond my hope if I had any, they were, as I heard, nay, as I myself felt, received with the not ordinary applause of all—­yea, of those who at other times were, on account of disagreements in our studies, altogether of an angry and unfriendly spirit towards me.  A generous mode of exercising rivalry this, and not unworthy of a royal breast, if, when friendship itself is wont often to misconstrue much that is blamelessly done, yet then sharp and hostile enmity did not grudge to interpret much that was perchance erroneous, and not a little, doubtless, that was unskilfully said, more clemently than I merited.”

It is sufficiently manifest from this that after two years’ residence Milton had incurred much anger and unpopularity “on account of disagreements in our studies,” which can scarcely mean anything else than his disapprobation of the University system.  Notwithstanding this he had been received on a former occasion with unexpected favour, and on the present is able to say, “I triumph as one placed among the stars that so many men, eminent for erudition, and nearly the whole University have flocked hither.”  We have thus a miniature history of Milton’s connection with his Alma Mater.  We see him giving offence by the freedom of his strictures on the established practices, and misliking them so much as to write in 1642, “Which [University] as in the time of her better health and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less.”  But, on the other hand, we see his intellectual revolt overlooked on account of his unimpeachable conduct and his brilliant talents, and himself selected to represent his college on an occasion when an able representative was indispensable.  Cambridge had all imaginable complacency in the scholar, it was towards the reformer that she assumed, as afterwards towards Wordsworth, the attitude of

      “Blind Authority beating with his staff
    The child that would have led him.”