The stroke at the subserviency of the lawyers to the Crown (male custodita jura gentis) would be appreciated by the elder Milton, nor can we doubt that the old Puritan fully approved his son’s resilience from a church denied by Arminianism and prelacy.  He would not so easily understand the dedication of a life to poetry, and the poem from which the above citation is taken seems to have been partly composed to smooth his repugnance away.  He was soon to have stronger proofs that his son had not mistaken his vocation:  it would be pleasant to be assured that the old man was capable of valuing “Comus” and “Lycidas” at their worth.  The circumstances under which “Comus” was produced, and its subsequent publication with the extorted consent of the author, show that Milton did not wholly want encouragement and sympathy.  The insertion of his lines on Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1632) also denotes some reputation as a wit.  In the main, however, remote from urban circles and literary cliques, with few correspondents and no second self in sweetheart or friend, he must have led a solitary intellectual life, alone with his great ambition, and probably pitied by his acquaintance.  “The world,” says Emerson to the Poet, “is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a churl for a long season.  This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has protected his well-beloved flower.”  The special nature of Milton’s studies cannot now be exactly ascertained.  Of his manner of studying he informs Diodati, “No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round off, as it were, some great period of my studies.”  Of his object he says:  “God has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the beautiful.  Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought Proserpine as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, and to follow it leading me on as with certain assured traces.”  We may be sure that he read the classics of all the languages which he understood.  His copies of Euripides, Pindar, Aratus, and Lycophron, are, or have been recently, extant, with marginal notes, proving that he weighed what he read.  A commonplace book contains copious extracts from historians, and he tells Diodati that he has read Greek history to the fall of Constantinople.  He speaks of having occasionally repaired to London for instruction in mathematics and music.  His own programme, promulgated eight years later, but without doubt perfectly appropriate to his Horton period, names before all else—­“Devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and send out His Seraphim with the hallowed fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases.  To this must be added select reading, steady observation, and insight into all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in