above the restraints of mere formularies; but he spoke unadvisedly if he meant to contend that a priest should be invested with the freedom of a Prophet.  His words, however, must be taken in connection with the peculiar circumstances of the time.  It was an era of High Church reaction, which was fast becoming a shameful persecution.  The two moderate prelates, Abbot and Williams, had for years been in disgrace, and the Church was ruled by the well-meaning, but sour, despotic, meddlesome bigot whom wise King James long refused to make a bishop because “he could not see when matters were well.”  But if Laud was infatuated as a statesman, he was astute as a manager; he had the Church completely under his control, he was fast filling it with his partisans and creatures, he was working it for every end which Milton most abhorred, and was, in particular, allying it with a king who in 1632 had governed three years without a Parliament.  The mere thought that he must call this hierarch his Father in God, the mere foresight that he might probably come into collision with him, and that if he did his must be the fate of the earthen vessel, would alone have sufficed to deter Milton from entering the Church.

Even so resolute a spirit as Milton’s could hardly contemplate the relinquishment of every definite calling in life without misgiving, and his friends could hardly let it pass without remonstrance.  There exists in his hand the draft of a letter of reply to the verbal admonition of some well-wisher, to whom he evidently feels that he owes deference.  His friend seems to have thought that he was yielding to the allurements of aimless study, neglecting to return as service what he had absorbed as knowledge.  Milton pleads that his motive must be higher than the love of lettered ease, for that alone could never overcome the incentives that urge him to action.  “Why should not all the hopes that forward youth and vanity are afledge with, together with gain, pride, and ambition, call me forward more powerfully than a poor, regardless, and unprofitable sin of curiosity should be able to withhold?” And what of the “desire of honour and repute and immortal fame seated in the breast of every true scholar?” That his correspondent may the better understand him, he encloses a “Petrarchean sonnet,” recently composed, on his twenty-third birthday, not one of his best, but precious as the first of his frequent reckonings with himself:—­

   “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
      Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year! 
      My hasting days fly on with full career;
      But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th. 
    Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
      That I to manhood am arrived so near;
      And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
      Than some more timely-happy spirits indu’th. 
    Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
      It shall be still in strictest measure even
      To that same lot, however mean or high,
    Towards which Time leads me, and the Will of Heaven. 
      All is, if I have grace to use it so,
      As ever in my great Taskmaster’s eye.”