as a singular contentment; and let it be to good men no light satisfaction, that the slanderer here confesses, he has "no further notice of me than his own conjecture." Although it had been honest to have inquired, before he uttered such infamous words, and I am credibly informed he did inquire; but finding small comfort from the intelligence which he received, whereon to ground the falsities which he had provided, thought it his likeliest course under a pretended ignorance to let drive at random, lest he should lose his odd ends, which from some penurious book of characters he had been culling out and would fain apply. Not caring to burden me with those vices, whereof, among whom my conversation hath been, I have been ever least suspected; perhaps not without some subtlety to cast me into envy, by bringing on me a necessity to enter into mine own praises. In which argument I know every wise man is more unwillingly drawn to speak, than the most repining ear can be averse to hear. 18. Nevertheless, since I dare not wish to pass this life unpersecuted of slanderous tongues, for God hath told us that to be generally praised is woeful, I shall rely on his promise to free the innocent from causeless aspersions: whereof nothing sooner can assure me, than if I shall feel him now assisting me in the just vindication of myself, which yet I could defer, it being more meet, that to those other matters of public debatement in this book I should give attendance first, but that I fear it would but harm the truth for me to reason in her behalf, so long as I should suffer my honest estimation to lie unpurged from these insolent suspicions. And if I shall be large, or unwonted in justifying myself to those who know me not, for else it would be needless, let them consider that a short slander will oft times reach further than a long apology; and that he who will do justly to all men, must begin from knowing how, if it so happen, to be not unjust to himself. I must be thought, if this libeller (for now he shows himself to be so) can find belief, after an inordinate and riotous youth spent at the university, to have been at length "vomited out thence." (13) For which commodious lie, that he may be encouraged in the trade another time, I thank him; for it hath given me an apt occasion to acknowledge publicly with all grateful mind, that more than ordinary favour and respect, which I found above any of my (13) The Rev. Mr. Mitford and Sir Egerton Bridges admit, perhaps too readily, that Milton underwent what, in university cant, is termed "rustication." That he was expelled from college, or subjected to personal chastisement, no one now believes; nor was there ever a man, not wholly blinded by prejudice, who could seriously entertain the opinion. Johnson, supposing he was serving his party by reviving and giving currency to the calumny, prefaces his fiction with affected reluctance and con"I am ashamed to relate," he says, "what I fear is true, Milton was one of the last students in either university that suffered the public indignity of corporal correction." If he really felt shame, it was because he feared, or rather was persuaded, that what he was about to say was not true. This could have been his only apprehension. To have discovered some foundation for his slander would to him have been matter of joy and gratulation, not of sorrow. His pretended fear, therefore, was as hypocritical as his narrative is destitute of truth. cern. equals at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the fellows of that college wherein I spent some years who at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay; as by many letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time, and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me. Which being likewise propense to all such as were for their studious and civil life worthy of esteem, I could not wrong their judgments and upright intentions, so much as to think I had that regard from them for other cause, than that I might be still encouraged to proceed in the honest and laudable courses, of which they apprehended I had given good proof. And to those ingenuous and friendly men, who were ever the countenancers of virtuous and hopeful wits, I wish the best and happiest things, that friends in absence wish one to another. 19. As for the common approbation or dislike of that place, as now it is, that I should esteem or disesteem myself, or any other the more for that, too simple and too credulous is the confuter, if he think to obtain with me, or any right discerner. (1) (14) In his Reason of Church Government, as Mr. Mitford has already remarked, he had expressed his contempt for the University as a place for the training of youth, whose "honest and ingenuous natures coming to the universities to store themselves with good and solid learning, are there unfortunately fed with nothing else but the scragged and thorny lectures of monkish and miserable sophistry; were sent home again with such a scholastical bur in their throats, as hath stopped and hindered Of small practice were that physician, who could not judge by what both she or her sister hath of long time vomited, that the worser stuff she strongly keeps in her stomach, but the better she is ever kecking at, and is queasy. She vomits now out of sickness; but ere it will be well with her, she must vomit by strong physic. In the meantime that suburb sink, as this rude scavenger calls it, and more than scurrilously taunts it with the plague, having a worse plague in his middle entrail, that suburb wherein I dwell shall be in my account a more honourable place than his university. Which as in the time of her better health, and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now much less. But he follows me to the city, still usurping and forging beyond his book notice, which only he affirms to have had; "and where my morning haunts are, he wisses not." It is wonder, that being so rare an alchymist of slander, he could not extract that, as well as the university vomit, and the suburb sink which his art could distil so cunningly ; but because his all true and generous philosophy from entering; cracked their voices for ever with metaphysical gargarisms; hath made them admire a sort of formal outside men, prelatically addicted, whose unchastened and overwrought minds were never yet initiated, nor subdued under the true love of moral or religious virtue, which two are the best and greatest points of learning: but either slightly trained up in a kind of hypocritical and hackney course of literature to get their living by, and dazzle the ignorant, or else fondly overstudied in useless controversies, except those which they use, with all the specious and delusive subtlety they are able, to defend their prelatical Sparta." limbec fails him, to give him and envy the more vexation, I will tell him. 20. Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping, or concocting the surfeits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring, in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour, or to devotion; in summer as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, (15) to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught then, with useful and generous labours preserving the body's health and hardiness to render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion, and our (15) Herault de Sechelles relates a curious story à propos of Buffon's habit of early rising. "Il rentrait quelquefois des soupers de Paris," says he, "à deux heures après minuit, lorsqu'il était jeune ; et à cinq heures du matin, un Savoyard venait le tirer par les pieds, et le mettre sur le carreau, avec ordre de lui faire violence, dût-il se fâcher contre lui." At the age of seventy-eight he still rose at five o'clock. "A cinq heures il se lève, s'habille, se coeffe, dicte ses lettres, règles ses affaires. A six heures, il monte à son cabinet, qui est à l'extrémité de ses jardins, ce que fait presqu'un demi-quart de lieue, et la distance est d'autant plus pénible qu'il faut toujours ouvrir des grilles, et monter de terrasses en terrasses."—Voyage à Montbar, p. 16, 17. In traversing the Côte d'ôr the traveller still beholds from a distance the tower and gardens of Buffon. To his own practice of early rising Milton alludes in L'Allegro : "To hear the lark begin his flight, And again in Il Penseroso, there is a beautiful description of the dawn, written with the graphic minuteness of one who had often admired it. |