Milton's Youth

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Title:     Milton's Youth
Author: David Masson [More Titles by Masson]

MILTON'S YOUTH.[1]

[1] North British Review, February 1852: --"The Works of John Milton." 8vols. London: Pickering. 1851.

Never surely did a youth leave the academic halls of England more full of fair promise than Milton, when, at the age of twenty-three, he quitted Cambridge to reside at his father's house, amid the quiet beauties of a rural neighbourhood some twenty miles distant from London. Fair in person, with a clear fresh complexion, light brown hair which parted in the middle and fell in locks to his shoulders, clear grey eyes, and a well-knit frame of moderate proportions--there could not have been found a finer picture of pure and ingenuous English youth. And that health and beauty which distinguished his outward appearance, and the effect of which was increased by a voice surpassingly sweet and musical, indicated with perfect truth the qualities of the mind within. Seriousness, studiousness, fondness for flowers and music, fondness also for manly exercises in the open air, courage and resolution of character, combined with the most maiden purity and innocence of life--these were the traits conspicuous in Milton in his early years. Of his accomplishments it is hardly necessary to take particular note. Whatever of learning, of science, or of discipline in logic or philosophy, the University at that time could give, he had duly and in the largest measure acquired. No better Greek or Latin scholar probably had the University in that age sent forth; he was proficient in the Hebrew tongue, and in all the other customary aids to a Biblical Theology; and he could speak and write well in French and Italian. His acquaintance, obtained by independent reading, with the history and with the whole body of the literature of ancient and modern nations, was extensive and various. And, as nature had endowed him in no ordinary degree with that most exquisite of her gifts, the ear and the passion for harmony, he had studied music as an art, and had taught himself not only to sing in the society of others, but also to touch the keys for his solitary pleasure.

The instruments which Milton preferred as a musician were, his biographers tell us, the organ and the bass-viol. This fact seems to us to be not without its significance. Were we to define in one word our impression of the prevailing tone, the characteristic mood and disposition of Milton's mind, even in his early youth, we should say that it consisted in a deep and habitual seriousness. We use the word in none of those special and restricted senses that are sometimes given to it. We do not mean that Milton, at the period of his early youth with which we are now concerned, was, or accounted himself as being, a confessed member of that noble party of English Puritans with which he afterwards became allied, and to which he rendered such vast services. True, he himself tells us, in his account of his education, that "care had ever been had of him, with his earliest capacity, not to be negligently trained in the precepts of the Christian religion;" and in the fact that his first tutor, selected for him by his father, was one Thomas Young, a Scotchman of subsequent distinction among the English Puritans, there is enough to prove that the formation of his character in youth was aided expressly by Puritanical influences. But Milton, if ever in a denominational sense he could be called a Puritan (he wore his hair long, and in other respects did not conform to the usages of the Puritan party), could hardly, with any propriety, be designated as a Puritan in this sense, at the time when he left College. There is evidence that at this time he had not given so much attention, on his own personal account, to matters of religious doctrine as he afterwards bestowed. That seriousness of which we speak was, therefore, rather a constitutional seriousness, ratified and nourished by rational reflection, than the assumed temper of a sect. "A certain reservedness of natural disposition, and a moral discipline learnt out of the noblest philosophy"--such, in Milton's own words, were the causes which, apart from his Christian training, would have always kept him, as he believed, above the vices that debase youth. And herein the example of Milton contradicts much that is commonly advanced by way of a theory of the poetical character.

Poets and artists generally, it is held, are and ought to be distinguished by a predominance of sensibility over principle, an excess of what Coleridge called the spiritual over what he called the moral part of man. A nature built on quicksands, an organization of nerve languid or tempestuous with occasion, a soul falling and soaring, now subject to ecstasies and now to remorses--such, it is supposed, and on no small induction of actual instances, is the appropriate constitution of the poet. Mobility, absolute and entire destitution of principle properly so called, capacity for varying the mood indefinitely rather than for retaining and keeping up one moral gesture or resolution through all moods: this, say the theorists, is the essential thing in the structure of the artist. Against the truth of this, however, as a maxim of universal application, the character of Milton, as well as that of Wordsworth after him, is a remarkable protest. Were it possible to place before the theorists all the materials which exist for judging of Milton's personal disposition as a young man, without exhibiting to them at the same time the actual and early proofs of his poetical genius, their conclusion, were they true to their theory, would necessarily be that the basis of his nature was too solid and immovable, the platform of personal aims and aspirations over which his thoughts moved and had footing too fixed and firm, to permit that he should have been a poet. Nay, whosoever, even appreciating Milton as a poet, shall come to the investigation of his writings armed with that preconception of the poetical character which is sure to be derived from an intimacy with the character of Shakespeare will hardly escape some feeling of the same kind. Seriousness, we repeat, a solemn and even austere demeanour of mind, was the characteristic of Milton even in his youth. And the outward manifestation of this was a life of pure and devout observance. This is a point that ought not to be avoided, or dismissed in mere general language; for he who does not lay stress on this knows not and loves not Milton. Accept, then, by way of more particular statement, his own remarkable words in justifying himself against an innuendo of one of his adversaries in later life, reflecting on the tenor of his juvenile pursuits and behaviour. "A certain niceness of nature," he says, "an honest haughtiness and self-esteem either of what I was, or what I might be (which let envy call pride), and lastly that modesty whereof, though not in the title-page, yet here I may be excused to make some beseeming profession, all these, uniting the supply of their natural aid together, kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and unlawful prostitutions." Fancy, ye to whom the moral frailty of genius is a consolation, or to whom the association of virtue with youth and Cambridge is a jest--fancy Milton, as this passage from his own pen describes him at the age of twenty-three, returning to his father's house from the university, full of its accomplishments and its honours, an auburn-haired youth, beautiful as the Apollo of a northern clime, and that beautiful body the temple of a soul pure and unsoiled. Truly, a son for a mother to take to her arms with joy and pride!

Connected with this austerity of character, discernible in Milton even in his youth, may be noted also, as indeed it is noted in the passage just cited, a haughty yet modest self-esteem and consciousness of his own powers. Throughout all Milton's works there may be discerned a vein of this noble egotism, this unbashful self-assertion. Frequently, in arguing with an opponent, or in setting forth his own views on any subject of discussion, he passes, by a very slight topical connexion, into an account of himself, his education, his designs, and his relations to the matter in question; and this sometimes so elaborately and at such length, that the impression is as if he said to his readers, "Besides all my other arguments, take this also as the chief and conclusive argument, that it is I, a man of such and such antecedents, and with such and such powers to perform far higher work than you see me now engaged in, who affirm and maintain this." In his later years Milton evidently believed himself to be, if not the greatest man in England, at least the greatest writer, and one whose egomet dixi was entitled to as much force in the intellectual commonwealth as the decree of a civil magistrate is invested with in the order of civil life. All that he said or wrote was backed in his own consciousness by a sense of the independent importance of the fact that it was he, Milton, who said or wrote it; and often, after arguing a point for some time on a footing of ostensible equality with his readers, he seems suddenly to stop, retire to the vantage-ground of his own thoughts, and bid his readers follow him thither, if they would see the whole of that authority which his words had failed to express.

Such, we say, is Milton's habit in his later writings. In his early life, of course, the feeling which it shows existed rather as an undefined consciousness of superior power, a tendency silently and with satisfaction to compare his own intellectual measure with that of others, a resolute ambition to be and to do something great. Now we cannot help thinking that it will be found that this particular form of self-esteem goes along with that moral austerity of character which we have alleged to be discernible in Milton even in his youth, rather than with that temperament of varying sensibility which is, according to the general theory, regarded as characteristic of the poet. Men of this latter type, as they vary in the entire mood of their mind, vary also in their estimate of themselves. No permanent consciousness of their own destiny, or of their own worth in comparison with others, belongs to them. In their moods of elevation they are powers to move the world; but, while the impulse that has gone forth from them in one of those moods may be still thrilling its way onward in wider and wider circles through the hearts of myriads they have never seen, they, the fountains of the impulse, the spirit being gone from them, may be sitting alone in the very spot and amid the ashes of their triumph, sunken and dead, despondent and self-accusing. It requires the evidence of positive results, the assurance of other men's praises, the visible presentation of effects which they cannot but trace to themselves, to convince such men that they are or can do anything. Whatever manifestations of egotism, whatever strokes of self-assertion come from such men, come in the very burst and phrenzy of their passing resistlessness. The calm, deliberate, and unshaken knowledge of their own superiority is not theirs. True, Shakespeare, the very type, if rightly understood, of this class of minds, is supposed in his Sonnets to have predicted, in the strongest and most deliberate terms, his own immortality as a poet. It could be proved, however, were this the place for such an investigation, that the common interpretation of those passages of the Sonnets which are supposed to supply this trait in the character of Shakespeare is nothing more nor less than a false reading of a very subtle meaning which the critics have missed. Those other passages of the Sonnets which breathe an abject melancholy and discontentment with self, which exhibit the poet as "cursing his fate," as "bewailing his outcast state," as looking about abasedly among his literary contemporaries, envying the "art" of one, and the "scope" of another, and even wishing sometimes that the very features of his face had been different from what they were and like those of some he knew, are, in our opinion, of far greater autobiographic value.

Nothing of this kind is to be found in Milton. As a Christian, indeed, humiliation before God was a duty the meaning of which he knew full well; but, as a man moving among other men, he possessed, in that moral seriousness and stoic scorn of temptation which characterized him, a spring of ever-present pride, dignifying his whole bearing among his fellows, and at times arousing him to a kingly intolerance. In short, instead of that dissatisfaction with self which we trace as a not unfrequent feeling with Shakespeare, we find in Milton, even in his early youth, a recollection firm and habitual that he was one of those servants to whom God had entrusted the stewardship of ten talents. In that very sonnet, for example, written on his twenty-third birthday, in which he laments that he had as yet achieved so little, his consolation is that the power of achievement was still indubitably within him--

"All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-Master's eye."

And what was that special mode of activity to which Milton, still in the bloom and seed-time of his years, had chosen to dedicate the powers of which he was so conscious? He had been destined by his parents for the Church; but this opening into life he had definitively and deliberately abandoned. With equal decision he renounced the profession of the Law; and it does not seem to have been long after the conclusion of his career at the university when he renounced the prospects of professional life altogether. His reasons for this, which are to be gathered from various passages of his writings, seem to have resolved themselves into a jealous concern for his own absolute intellectual freedom. He had determined, as he says, "to lay up, as the best treasure and solace of a good old age, the honest liberty of free speech from his youth;" and neither the Church nor the Bar of England, at the time when he formed that resolution, was a place where he could hope to keep it. For a man so situated, the alternative, then as now, was the practice or profession of literature. To this, therefore, as soon as he was able to come to a decision on the subject, Milton had implicitly, if not avowedly, dedicated himself. To become a great writer, and, above all, a great poet; to teach the English language a new strain and modulation; to elaborate and surrender over to the English nation works that would make it more potent and wise in the age that was passing, and more memorable and lordly in the ages to come: such was the form which Milton's ambition had assumed when, laying aside his student's garb, he went to reside under his father's roof.

Nor was this merely a choice of necessity, the reluctant determination of a young soul "Church-outed by the prelates" and disgusted with the chances of the Law. Milton, in the Church, would certainly have been such an archbishop, mitred or unmitred, as England has never seen; and the very passage of such a man across the sacred floor would have trampled into timely extinction much that has since sprung up amongst us to trouble and perplex, and would have modelled the ecclesiasticism of England into a shape that the world might have gazed at with no truant glance backward to the splendours of the Seven Hills. And, doubtless, even amid the traditions of the Law, such a man would have performed the feats of a Samson, albeit of a Samson in chains. An inward prompting, therefore, a love secretly plighted to the Muse, and a sweet comfort and delight in her sole society, which no other allurement, whether of profit or pastime, could equal or diminish,--this, less formally perhaps, but as really as care for his intellectual liberty, or distaste for the established professions of his time, determined Milton's early resolution as to his future way of life. On this point it will be best to quote his own words. "After I had," he says, "from my first years, by the ceaseless diligence and care of my father (whom God recompense!), been exercised to the tongues and some sciences, as my age would suffer, by sundry masters and teachers both at home and at the schools, it was found that, whether ought was imposed upon me by them that had the overlooking or betaken to of mine own choice, in English or other tongue, prosing or versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain vital signs it had, was likely to live." The meaning of which sentence is that Milton, before his three-and-twentieth year, knew himself to be a poet.

He knew this, he says, by "certain vital signs" discernible in what he had already written. What were those "vital signs," those proofs indubitable to Milton that he had the art and faculty of a poet? We need but refer the reader for the answer to those smaller poetical compositions of Milton, both in English and in Latin, which survive as specimens of his earliest Muse. Of these, some three or four which happen to be specially dated--such as the Elegy on the Death of a Fair Infant, written in 1626, or the author's eighteenth year; the well-known Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, written in 1629, when the author was just twenty-one; and the often-quoted Lines on Shakespeare, written not much later--may be cited as convenient materials from which anyone who would convince himself minutely of Milton's youthful vocation to poetry, rather than to anything else, may derive proofs on that head. Here will be found power of the most rare and beautiful conception, choice of words the most exact and exquisite, the most perfect music and charm of verse. Above all, here will be found that ineffable something--call it imagination or what we will--wherein lies the intimate and ineradicable peculiarity of the poet: the art to work on and on for ever in a purely ideal element, to chase and marshal airy nothings according to a law totally unlike that of rational association, never hastening to a logical end like the schoolboy when on errand, but still lingering within the wood like the schoolboy during holiday. This peculiar mental habit, nowhere better described than by Milton himself when he speaks of verse

"Such as the meeting soul may pierce,
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linkèd sweetness long drawn out
With wanton heed and giddy cunning,"

is so characteristic of the poetical disposition that, though in most of the greatest poets, as, for example, Dante, Goethe, Shakespeare in his dramas, Chaucer, and almost all the ancient Greek poets, it is not observable in any extraordinary degree, chiefly because in them the element of direct reference to human life and its interests had fitting preponderance, yet it may be affirmed that he who, tolerating or admiring these poets, does not relish also such poetry as that of Spenser, Keats, and Shakespeare in his minor pieces, but complains of it as wearisome and sensuous, is wanting in a portion of the genuine poetic taste.

There was but one "vital sign" the absence of which in Milton could, according to any theory of the poetical character, have begotten doubts in his own mind, or in the minds of his friends, whether poetry was his peculiar and appropriate function. The single source of possible doubt on this head could have been no other than that native austerity of feeling and temper, that real though not formal Puritanism of heart and intellect, which we have noticed as distinguishing Milton from his youth upward. The poet, it is said in these days, when, by psychologizing a man, it is supposed we can tell what course of life he is fit for--the poet ought to be universally sympathetic; he ought to hate nothing, despise nothing. And a notion equivalent to this, though by no means so articulately expressed, was undoubtedly prevalent in Milton's own time. As the Puritans, on the one hand, had set their faces against all those practices of profane singing, dancing, masquing, theatre-going, and the like, in which the preservation of the spirit of the arts was supposed to be involved, so the last party in the world from which the reputed devotees of the arts in those days would have expected a poet to arise was that of the Puritans. Even in Shakespeare, and much more in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other poets of the Elizabethan age, may be traced evidences of an instinctive enmity to that Puritanical mode of thinking which was then on the increase in English society, and in the triumph of which those great minds foresaw the proscription of their craft and their pleasures. When Sir Toby says to Malvolio, "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" and when the Clown adds, "Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too," it is the Knight and the Clown on the one side against Malvolio the Puritan on the other. That the defence of the festive in this passage is not borne by more respectable personages than the two who speak is indeed a kind of indication that Shakespeare's personal feelings with regard to the austere movement which he saw gathering around him were by no means so deep or bitter as to discompose him; but, if his profounder soul could behold such things with serenity, and even pronounce them good, they assuredly met with enough of virulence and invective among his lesser contemporaries. That literary crusade against the Puritans, as canting, sour-visaged, mirth-forbidding, art-abhorring religionists, which came to its height at the time when Butler wrote his Hudibras, and Wycherley his plays, was already hot when the wits of King James's days used to assemble after the theatre, in their favourite taverns; and if, sallying out after one of their merry evenings in their most favourite tavern of all, the Mermaid in Bread Street, those assembled poets and dramatists had gone in search of the youth who was likeliest to be the poet of the age then beginning, they certainly would not have gone to that modest residence in the same street where the son of the Puritanic scrivener, then preparing for College, was busy over his books. Nay, if Ben Jonson, the last twenty-nine years of whose life coincided with the first twenty-nine of Milton's, had followed the young student from the house where he was born in Bread Street to his rooms at Cambridge, and had there become acquainted with him and looked over his early poetical exercises, it is probable enough that, while praising them so far, he would have constituted himself the organ of that very opinion as to the requisites of the poetical character which we are now discussing, and declared, in some strong phrase or other, that the youth would have been all the more hopeful as a poet if he had had a little more of the bon vivant in his constitution.

This, then, is a point of no little importance, involving as it does the relations of Milton as a poet to the age in which he lived, that splendid age of Puritan mastery in England which came between the age of Shakespeare and Elizabeth and the age of Dryden and the second Charles. Milton was the poet of that intermediate era; that his character was such as we have described it made him only the more truly a representative of all that was then deepest in English society; and, in inquiring, therefore, in what manner Milton's austerity as a man affected his art as a poet, we are, at the same time, investigating the rationale of that remarkable fact in the history of English literature, the interpolation of so original and isolated a development as the Miltonic poems between the inventive luxuriousness of the Elizabethan epoch and the witty licentiousness that followed the Restoration.

First, then, it was not humour that came to the rescue, in Milton's case, to help him out in those respects wherein, according to the theory in question, the strictness and austerity of his own disposition would have injured his capacity to be a poet. There are and have been men as strict and austere as he, who yet, by means of this quality of humour, have been able to reconcile themselves to much in human life lying far away from, and even far beneath, the sphere of their own practice and conscientious liking. As Pantagruel, the noble and meditative, endured and even loved those immortal companions of his, the boisterous and profane Friar John, and the cowardly and impish Panurge, so these men, remaining themselves with all rigour and punctuality within the limits of sober and exemplary life, are seen extending their regards to the persons and the doings of a whole circle of reprobate Falstaffs, Pistols, Clowns, and Sir Toby Belches. They cannot help it. They may and often do blame themselves for it; they wish that, in their intercourse with the world, they could more habitually turn the austere and judicial side of their character to the scenes and incidents that there present themselves, simply saying of each "That is right and worthy" or "That is wrong and unworthy," and treating it accordingly. But they break down in the trial. Suddenly some incident presents itself which is not only right but clumsy, or not only wrong but comic, and straightway the austere side of their character wheels round to the back, and judge, jury, and witnesses are convulsed with untimely laughter. It was by no means so with Milton. As his critics have generally remarked, he had little of humour, properly so called, in his composition. His laughter is the laughter of scorn. With one unvarying judicial look he confronted the actions of men, and, if ever his tone altered as he uttered his judgments, it was only because something roused him to a pitch of higher passion. Take, as characteristic, the following passage, in which he replies to the taunt of an opponent who had asked where he, the antagonist of profane amusements, had procured that knowledge of theatres and their furniture which certain allusions in one of his books showed him to possess:--

"Since there is such necessity to the hearsay of a tire, a periwig, or a vizard, that plays must have been seen, what difficulty was there in that, when in the colleges so many of the young divines, and those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that ministry which either they had or were nigh having to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies, with their grooms and mademoiselles? There, whilst they acted and overacted, among other young scholars, I was a spectator: they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and, to make up the atticism, they were out, and I hissed."--Apology for Smectymnuus.

Who can doubt that to a man to whom such a scene as this presented itself in a light so different from that in which a Shakespeare would have viewed it Friar John himself, if encountered in the real world, would have been simply the profane and unendurable wearer of the sacred garb, Falstaff only a foul and grey-haired iniquity, Pistol but a braggart and coward, and Sir Toby Belch but a beastly sot?

That office, however, which humour did not perform for Milton, in his intercourse with the world of past and present things, was in part performed by what he did in large measure possess--intellectual inquisitiveness: respect for intellect, its accomplishments, and its rights. If any quality in the actions or writings of other men could have won Milton's favourable regards, even where his moral sense condemned, that quality, we believe, was intellectual greatness, and especially greatness of his own stamp, or marked by any of his own features. Hence that tone of almost pitying admiration which pervades his representation of the ruined Archangel; hence his uniformly respectful references to the great intellects of Paganism and of the Catholic world; and hence, we think, his unbounded and, for a time at least, unqualified reverence for Shakespeare. As by the direct exercise of his own intellect, on the one hand, applied to the rational discrimination for himself of what was really wrong from what was only ignorantly reputed to be so, he had kept his mind clear, as Cromwell also did, from many of those sectarian prejudices in the matter of moral observance which were current in his time--justified, for example, his love of music, his liking for natural beauty, his habits of cheerful recreation, his devotion to various literature, and even, most questionable of all, as would then have been thought, his affection for the massy pillars and storied windows of ecclesiastical architecture,--so, reflexly, by a recognition of the intellectual liberty of others, he seems to have distinctly apprehended the fact that there might be legitimate manifestations of intellect of a kind very different from his own. A Falstaff in real life, for example, might have been to Milton the most unendurable of horrors, just as, according to his own confession, a play-acting clergyman was his abomination; and yet, in the pages of his honoured Shakespeare, Sir John as mentor to the Prince, and Parson Hugh Evans as the Welch fairy among the mummers, may have been creations he would con over and very dearly appreciate. And this accounts for the multifarious and unrestricted character of his literary studies. Milton, we believe, was a man whose intellectual inquisitiveness and respect for talent would have led him, in other instances than that of the College theatricals, to see and hear much that his heart derided, to study and know what he would not strictly have wished to imitate. Ovid and Tibullus, for example, contain much that is far from Miltonic; and yet that he read poets of this class with particular pleasure let the following quotation prove:--

"I had my time, readers, as others have who have good learning bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was, it might be soonest attained; and, as the manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended: whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but, as my age was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets whereof the schools are not scarce, whom, both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing (which, in imitation, I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part in me) and for their matter (which, what it is, there be few who know not), I was so allured to read that no recreation came to me more welcome--for, that it was then those years with me which are excused though they be least severe I may be saved the labour to remember ye."--Apology for Smectymnuus.

That Milton, then, notwithstanding his natural austerity and seriousness even in youth, was led by his keen appreciation of literary beauty and finish, and especially by his delight in sweet and melodious verse, to read and enjoy the poetry of those writers who are usually quoted as examples of the lusciousness and sensuousness of the poetic nature, and even to prefer them to all others, is specially stated by himself. But let the reader, if he should think he sees in this a ground for suspecting that we have assigned too much importance to Milton's personal seriousness of disposition as a cause affecting his aims and art as a poet, distinctly mark the continuation--

"Whence, having observed them [the elegiac and love poets] to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were ablest to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love, those high perfections which, under one or other name, they took to celebrate, I thought with myself, by every instinct and presage of nature (which is not wont to be false), that what emboldened them to this task might, with such diligence as they used, embolden me, and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent!) the object of not unlike praises. For, albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle, yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious. Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For, by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient that, if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy things of themselves, or unchaste those names which before they had extolled, this effect it wrought in me: From that time forward their art I still applauded, but the men I deplored; and above them all preferred the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura, who never wrote but honour of them to whom they devote their verse, displaying sublime and pure thoughts without transgression. And long it was not after when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem--that is, a composition and pattern of the best and honourablest things; not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy."--Apology for Smectymnuus.

Here, at last, therefore, we have Milton's own judgment on the matter of our inquiry. He had speculated himself on that subject; he had made it a matter of conscious investigation what kind of moral tone and career would best fit a man to be a poet, on the one hand, or would be most likely to frustrate his hopes of writing well, on the other; and his conclusion, as we see, was dead against the "wild oats" theory. Had Ben Jonson, according to our previous fancy, proffered him, out of kindly interest, a touch of that theory, while criticising his juvenile poems, and telling him how he might learn to write better, there would have descended on the lecturer, as sure as fate, a rebuke, though from young lips, that would have made his strong face blush. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem:" fancy that sentence, an early and often pronounced formula of Milton's, as we may be sure it was, hurled some evening, could time and chance have permitted it, into the midst of the assembled Elizabethan wits at the Mermaid! What interruption of the jollity, what mingled uneasiness and resentment, what turning of faces towards the new speaker, what forced laughter to conceal consternation! Only Shakespeare, one thinks, had he been present, would have fixed on the bold youth a mild and approving eye, would have looked round the room thoroughly to observe the whole scene, and, remembering some passages in his own life, would mayhap have had his own thoughts! Certainly, at least, the essence of that wonderful and special development of the literary genius of England which came between the Elizabethan epoch and the epoch of the Restoration, and which was represented and consummated in Milton himself, consisted in the fact that then there was a temporary protest, and by a man able to make it good, against the theory of "wild oats," current before and current since. The nearest poet to Milton in this respect, since Milton's time, has undoubtedly been Wordsworth.

[The end]
David Masson's essay: Milton's Youth

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