time from so gifted a boy:  he must have read largely outside the regular curriculum, and probably he practised himself diligently in Latin verse.  For this he would have the prompting, and perhaps the aid, of the younger Gill, assistant to his father, who, while at the University, had especially distinguished himself by his skill in versification.  Gill must also have been a man of letters, affable and communicative, for Milton in after-years reminds him of their “almost constant conversations,” and declares that he had never left his company without a manifest accession of literary knowledge.  The Latin school exercises have perished, but two English productions of the period, paraphrases of Psalms executed at fifteen, remain to attest the boy’s proficiency in contemporary English literature.  Some of the unconscious borrowings attributed to him are probably mere coincidences, but there is still enough to evince acquaintance with “Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond, Drayton, Chaucer, Fairfax, and Buchanan.”  The literary merit of these versions seems to us to have been underrated.  There may be no individual phrase beyond the compass of an apt and sensitive boy with a turn for verse-making; but the general tone is masculine and emphatic.  There is not much to say, but what is said is delivered with a “large utterance,” prophetic of the “os magna soniturum,” and justifying his own report of his youthful promise:—­“It was found that whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or betaken to of mine own choice, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly by this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live.”

Among the incidents of Milton’s life at St. Paul’s School should not be forgotten his friendship with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy for his Protestantism.  A friendship memorable not only as Milton’s tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of the Vaudois.  The Italian language is named by him among three which, about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew.  It has been remarked, however, that his use of “Penseroso,” incorrect both in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language.  He entered as “a lesser pensioner” at Christ’s College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625; the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Tennyson.  Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.  The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose