was from London! Now it is only a few hours' distance by the Southwestern Rail-way; then it was a journeythey took a night's rest on the way ! His letter to Sprat from this place gives us an odd kind of idea of his enjoyment of the place.

"To DR. THOMAS SPRAT.

"Chertsey, May 21, 1665. "The first night that I came hither I caught so great a cold, with a defluxion of rheum, as made me keep my chamber ten days; and, two after, had such a bruise on my ribs with a fall, that I am yet unable to move or turn myself in my bed. This is my personal picture here to begin with. And, besides, I can get no money from my tenants, and have my meadows eaten up every night by cattle put in by my neighbors. What this signifies, or may come to in time, God knows; if it be ominous, it can end in nothing less than hanging. Another misfortune has been, and stranger than all the rest, that you have broken your word with me, and failed to come, even though you told Mr. Bois you would. This is what they call Monstri simile. I do hope to recover my late hurt so far within five or six days, though it be uncertain whether I shall ever recover it, as to walk about again. And then, methinks, you and I, and the dean, might be very merry upon St. Ann's Hill. You might very conveniently come hither the way of Hampton Court, lying there one night. I write this in pain, and can say no more. Verbum sapienti."

Poor Cowley did not long enjoy his retreat here, if he did enjoy it at all. Within two years he died at the Porch House (in 1667), in the forty-ninth year of his age. He was buried with great pomp in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer and Spenser.

PERHAPS no man ever inhabited more houses than our great epic poet, yet scarcely one of these now remains. The greater part of his residences were in London, and in the hundred and seventy-two years since his decease, the whole of this great metropolis has been, as it were, in a ferment of growth and extension. The great fire of London swept away an immense mass of the old houses; and if we look around us now, we see how very few of the ancient framed tenements which then prevailed now remain. Again, Milton generally chose his houses, even in the city, with a view to quiet and retirement. They were, say his biographers, generally garden houses, where he enjoyed the advantages of a certain remoteness from noise, and of some openness of space. These spaces the progress of population has filled with dense buildings, in the course of the erection of which, the old solitary houses have been pulled down.

Milton, as is well known, was born in Bread-street, Cheapside, at the sign of the Spread Eagle. The spread eagle was the armorial bearing of the family. His father

seized upon, that from his twelfth year he seldom ever retired from his books to bed before midnight; and that his eyes, originally weak, thus received the first causes of their future mischief. That, perceiving the danger of this, it could not arrest his ardor of study, though his nocturnal vigils, followed by his dayly exercises under his masters, brought on failing vision and pains in the head. Humphrey Lownes, a printer, living in Bread-street, supplied him, among other books, with Spenser and Sylvester's Du Bartas. Spenser was devoured with the intensest enthusiasm, and he has elsewhere called him his master.

Todd, the generally judicious biographer of Milton, praises his father for his discernment in the education of his son. The father, who was a very superior man, and especially fond of and skilled in music, certainly appears to have at once seen in his son the evidences of genius, and to have given to it every opportunity of development; but it is to be regretted that his fatherly encouragement was not attended with more prudence, and that he had not, instead of encouraging the habit of nocturnal study, the most pernicious that a student can fall into, restrained it. Had he done this, the poet might have retained his sight, and who shall say with what further advantage to the world!

At seventeen, Milton entered as a pensioner at Christ College, Cambridge. He was found to be a distinguished classical scholar, and conversant in several languages. His academical exercises attracted great attention, as well as his verses, both in English and Latin. His Latin elegies, in his eighteenth year, have always been regarded with wonder; and, indeed, in his Latinity, both in verse and prose, perhaps no modern writer has surpassed him. Hampton, the translator of Polybius, pronounced him the first Englishman who, since the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classic elegance. His extraordinary merit and acquisitions found, from the authorities of his college, general applause, spite of a disposition to severity, induced by his

sturdy opposition to them in opinion, on a plan of academical studies then under discussion.

Milton here, it appears, on the testimony of Aubrey, suffered an indignity from his tutor, which it was not in his high and independent nature to endure with impunity. He refers to the fact in his first elegy. He mentions threats and other things, which his disposition could not tolerate; that he was absent in a state of rustication, and felt no desire to revisit the reedy banks of the Cam. Aubrey says, from the information of our author's brother Christopher, that Milton's first tutor at Cambridge was Mr. Chappell, from whom receiving some unkindness (he whipped him), he was afterward, though it seemed against the rules of the college, transferred to the tuition of one Mr. Tovell. This information stands in the MS. Mus. Ashmol. Oxon., No. 10, p. iii. Warton, remarking on the fact, adds, that Milton "hated the place. He was not only offended at the college discipline, but had even conceived a dislike to the face of the country-the fields about Cambridge. He peevishly complains that the fields have no soft shades to attract the Muses, and there is something pointed in his exclamation, that Cambridge was a place quite incompatible with the votaries of Phoebus."

It was not very likely that a youth of perhaps eighteen, who was writing the elegies and epistles in Latin which drew upon him so much notice, would submit quietly to so degrading a treatment. This treatment, it appears from Warton, was common enough, nevertheless, at both Cambridge and Oxford, among the tutors at that time. But Milton spurned it, as became his great spirit and noble nature, and was in consequence, probably, rusticated for a time. But this could not have been long, nor could it have been accordant to the wishes of the fellows of his college. The offense was against the tutor, not against the heads of the college, in the poet's mind. In his Apology for Smeotymnus, he thanks an enemy for the opportunity of express