The University and Milton made a practical covenant like Frederick the Great and his subjects:  she did what she pleased, and he thought what he pleased.  In sharp contrast with his failure to influence her educational methods is “that more than ordinary respect which I found above any of my equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that College wherein I spent seven years; who, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection toward me.”  It may be added here that his comeliness and his chastity gained him the appellation of “Lady” from his fellow collegians:  and the rooms at Christ’s alleged to have been his are still pointed out as deserving the veneration of poets in any event; for whether Milton sacrificed to Apollo in them or not, it is certain that in them Wordsworth sacrificed to Bacchus.

For Milton’s own sake and ours his departure from the University was the best thing that could have happened to him.  It saved him from wasting his time in instructing others when he ought to be instructing himself.  From the point of view of advantage to the University, it is perhaps the most signal instance of the mischief of strictly clerical fellowships, now happily things of the past.  Only one fellowship at Christ’s was tenable by a layman:  to continue in academical society, therefore, he must have taken orders.  Such had been his intention when he first repaired to Cambridge, but the young man of twenty-three saw many things differently from the boy of sixteen.  The service of God was still as much as ever the aim of his existence, but he now thought that not all service was church service.  How far he had become consciously alienated from the Church’s creed it is difficult to say.  He was able, at all events, to subscribe the Articles on taking his degree, and no trace of Arianism appears in his writings for many years.  As late as 1641 he speaks of “the tri-personal Deity.”  Curiously enough, indeed, the ecclesiastical freethought of the day was then almost entirely confined to moderate Royalists, Hales, Chillingworth, Falkland.  But he must have disapproved of the Church’s discipline, for he disapproved of all discipline.  He would not put himself in the position of those Irish clergymen whom Strafford frightened out of their conscientious convictions by reminding them of their canonical obedience.  This was undoubtedly what he meant when he afterwards wrote:  “Perceiving that he who would take orders must subscribe slave.”  Speaking of himself a little further on as “Church-outed by the prelates,” he implies that he would not have refused orders if he could have had them on his own terms.  As regarded Milton personally this attitude was reasonable, he had a right to feel himself