Of
Milton’s skill at Cambridge, in what Wood calls "the
collegiate and academical exercises," specimens remain in
his Prolusiones quaedam oratoriae. They consist of seven
rhetorical Latin essays, generally in a whimsical
vein,
delivered by’ him, either n the hail of Christ’s College
or in the public university schools. To Milton’s Cambridge
period belong four of his Latin Familiar Epistles, and
the greater number of his preserved Latin poems, including:
(I) the seven pieces, written in 1626, which compose his
Elegiarum liber, two of the most interesting of them addressed
to his fiend, Charles Diodati, and one to his former tutor,
Young, in his exile at Hamburg; (2) the five short Gunpowder
Plot epigrams, now appended to the Elegies; and (3) the first
five pieces of the Sylvarum liber, the most important of which
are the hexameter poem In quintum novembris (1626), and
the piece entitled Naturamnon pai senium (1628). Of the
English poems of the Cambridge period the following is a dated
list: On the Death of a fair Infant (1625-1626), the
subject being the death of the first-born child of his sister
Anne Phillips; At a Vacation Exercise in the College
(1628), the magnificent Christmas ode; On the Morning of
Christ’s Nativity (1629); the fragment called The
Passion and the Song on May Morning, both probably
belonging to 1630; the sonnet On Shakespeare, certainly
belonging to that year, printed in the Shakespeare folio of
1632; the two facetious pieces On the University
Carrier (1630-1631); the Epitaph on the Marchioness
of Winchester (1631); the sonnet To the Nightingale,
probably of the same year; the sonnet On arriving at the
Age of twenty three, dating itself certainly in December
1631.
Of
Prelatical Episcopacy and whether it may be deduced from the
Apostolical Times (June 1641), Animadversions upon the
Remonstrant’s Defence against Smectymnuus (July 1641), The
Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaly (Feb.
1641—1642), Apology against a Pamphlet called a Modest
Confutation of the Animadversions, &c. (March and April
1641-1642). The first of these was directed chiefly against
that middle party which advocated a limited episcopacy, with
especial reply to the arguments of Archbishop Ussher, as the
chief exponent of the views of that party. Two of the others,
as the titles imply, belong to the Smectymnuan series, and
were castigations of Bishop Hall. The greatest of the four,
and the most important of all Milton’s anti-episcopal
pamphlets after the first, is that entitled The Reason of
Church Government. It is there that Milton takes his readers
into his confidence, speaking at length of himself and his
motives in becoming a controversialist. Poetry, he declares,
was his real vocation; it was with reluctance that he bad
resolved to “leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed
with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled
sea of noises and hoarse disputes”; but duty had left him no
option. The great poem or poems he had been meditating could
wait; and meanwhile, though in prosepolemics he had the use
only of his “left hand,’ that hand should be used with all
its might in the cause of his country and of liberty. The
Apology was in answer to a Modest Confutation of a Slanderous
and Scurrilous Libel, the joint work of Hall and his son,
attacking Milton’s personal character.
John
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