Nicholas Heinsius, upon information sought and obtained from Francis Junius, then living in England and cultivating John Milton's familiar acquaintance. When, many years after Milton's death, it was desired to find the relative truthfulness of several portraits by appeal to the memory of his surviving daughter, at the sight of one portrait, we are told, she broke into tears and said, "That is my father; that is my dear father. He was the life of every company he was in." In his later years, Milton's sense of the need of fellowship to man's true life was shown in his custom of giving two hours of the evening of every day to intercourse with friends, when he was visited or paid visits, and shared easy talk over his pipe.

A boy apt for friendship is likely to find in a large school some companion who has that likeness in essentials and diversity in accidents on which a lifelong friendship can be based. Milton at school found such a friend in Charles Diodati, son of Dr. Theodore Diodati, an Italian Protestant, practising with much success as a physician in London. Giovanni Diodati, who settled as a divine at Geneva-where he was Professor of Hebrew and translated the Bible into Italian-was Theodore's younger brother ; Charles Diodati's uncle. When Milton went to Cambridge, his friend Diodati had already gone to Oxford. This friendship

remained close and unbroken.

Milton was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, on the 12th of February 1625, returned then to London, was at home when James the First died on the 27th of March, and began his actual work at the University by matriculating on the 9th of April. He was in his seventeenth year when he became a Cambridge student, in the first days of the reign of Charles the First. The age of the new king was five-and-twenty. The last family event in Milton's home before he passed from school to college had been the marriage of his sister Anne to Mr. Edward Phillips, who had a good place in the Crown Office. A daughter was born to her in the winter of 1625-26; the infant caught a winter chill and died. The earliest original verse of Milton's that comes down to us is a piece "On a fair infant dying of a

B

cough," devoted to the consolation of his sister. It was so entirely private that Milton did not include it among his poems. when he made the first collection of them in 1645, but in the second edition, published by him twenty-eight years later, in the year before that of his death, calm recollections of the past caused this piece to be for the first time included.

On the 26th of March 1629 Milton took his B.A. degree. On the Christmas day of that year, when his age was one-and-twenty, he began his Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. His epigrams, Latin verses, written as memorials of dead worthies upon whose palls such offerings were laid, still represent the young poet's verse inspired by love to God and love to man. In 1631 the unexpected death of the young Marchioness of Winchester, lamented by Ben Jonson and other poets, drew also from young Milton lines of sympathy. In July 1632 he proceeded at Cambridge to his M.A. degree, and in that year hist first printed verses appeared. They were lines of reverence to Shakespeare, printed before the second folio of his plays, then published.

A year before, when the University life was drawing to a close, and he was twenty-three years old, Milton had written on his birthday a sonnet of self-dedication. He did not count himself to have attained, and found in his late spring few signs of ripened power; yet he said—

"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 Task Master's eye."

Afterwards, to his friend Charles Diodati, who asked what he was doing, Milton answered, "Let me whisper in your ear, lest I blush at the reply. I dream, so help me Heaven, of immortality, but my Muse rises as yet on very slender pinions; let us be humbly wise." When the time came for leaving college, Milton felt himself to

be shut out from the service of the Church, which his father had desired that he should enter, by conditions that appeared to tie his conscience. He tells himself at the close of that earnest review of his own past which forms the Introduction to the second part of his "Reason of Church Government" (page 155 of this volume), that to the service of the Church he was destined from childhood by his parents and friends and by his own resolutions : "Till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the Church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could retch, he must either straight perjure or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing." Having been thus, as he says, "Church outed" by the prelates, he has the better right to meddle with restraints of which he had himself been made to feel the hurt.

Milton's University course was complete when he took his M.A. degree in July 1632. What had been, meanwhile, the course of public events that so influenced his mind as to make him feel that he could not take orders in a Church of which Archbishop Laud had the direction?

William Laud was born at Reading in 1573, a clothier's son. He was educated at the Reading Grammar School, and went on to Oxford. There he became a Fellow of St. John's. From the first, at Oxford, he was eager and zealous in controversy on religious questions of the day, eager to check deviations from Church rule. His bias was towards authority, and he used with an absolute sincerity his great intellectual energy against the Puritans. Under James the First he obtained Church livings at Stanford in Northamptonshire, at North Kilworth in Leicestershire, at Cuckstone in Kent. In 1611 he was elected President of his College; then he became Chaplain to the King; and in 1616-year of the death of Shakespeare-Dr. Laud, who was then forty-three years old, and had taken the degree of D.D. eight years before, was made Dean of Gloucester. In 1617 he went with King

{

James to Scotland, and advised the King to endeavour to bring the Scotch clergy into conformity with the ritual of the English Church.

William Laud, fifty-two years old, was Bishop of St. David's when Charles the First came to the throne and Milton became a student at Cambridge. Laud officiated as Dean of Westminster at Charles's coronation. Soon afterwards he was translated to

the Bishopric of Bath and Wells. Two years later, in 1628, he became Bishop of London. In the August of that year the Duke of Buckingham was stabbed by Felton. Laud then succeeded

to his influence over the counsels of the King. Milton had taken his degree of Bachelor of Arts and had written his Hymn on the Morning of the Nativity when Dr. Laud, Bishop of London, became (in 1630) Chancellor of the University of Oxford. To that University, and to St. John's College especially, Laud was a most liberal benefactor. He built the inner quadrangle of his College; built the Convocation House and the Library above it ; and presented to the University thirteen hundred valuable MSS. in Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and other languages.

In 1632, when the battle for uniformity, with Dr. Laud as its chief leader, brought such pressure on the consciences of preachers that Milton could not take orders, Laud had not yet been made Archbishop of Canterbury. That office did not become vacant until the death of Dr. George Abbot on the 4th of August 1633, when Dr. William Laud was at once appointed to succeed him.

Of his labours in the Church, Laud himself said frankly and truly in his trial in 1643, "Of all diseases, I have ever hated a palsy in religion, well knowing that too often a dead palsy ends that disease in the fearful forgetfulness of God and His judgments. Ever since I came in place, I laboured nothing more than that the external public worship of God, too much slighted in most parts of the kingdom, might be preserved, and that with as much decency and uniformity as might be; being still of opinion that Unity cannot long continue in the Church when Uniformity is shut out at the church door. And I evidently saw that the

public neglect of God's service in the outward face of it, and the nasty lying of many places dedicated to that service, had almost cast a damp upon the true and inward worship of God; which, while we live in the body, needs external helps, and all little enough to keep it in any vigour." This was the battle for securing Unity of Worship by the maintenance of one uniform Ceremonial, in which, Milton saw only "the ghost of a linen decency." In this battle Laud, eager too eager for attack, was a most honest and unflinching leader.

Let me say here, what cannot be said too often, or felt too strongly, when great controversies stir the minds and hearts of men. Diversities of mind are like diversities of face; races and families have their prevailing characters, but each man, whatever the sway of heredity or of the accidents of life, has a distinct character of his own. God made us to differ, and our currents of opinions, with their storms and eddies, are as much a part of the divine purpose in Nature as the currents of the air and sea. A little slope of the axis upon which this earth turns daily in its yearly course about the sun, gives us the alternation of the seasons, seed-time and harvest, fills the year with its varieties of charm. A little variation of the direction of slope, so to speak, in the plane surface of the mind establishes the countless differences in the bias, inclination,-that determines the direction in which thought will run. A round shot on the middle of a sheet of paper held horizontally has as many ways of running to the edge, determined by slight variations of the slope, as we can imagine lines drawn from it. While accidents of life indefinitely multiply distinctions of character among us, every man's character is, in a way, governed by the action of that bias which Nature has established. He acts by it as part of the one divine thought which all Nature expresses. He lives and works by it in the evolution of man as a part of Nature. He is, through it, man taking the image of God by exercise of that one spiritual energy which alone of all things human lifts us to a sense of the divine. In the spiritual as in the physical world, there can be no health in unexercised powers. Man grows by struggle from the lower