ptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always
the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of
the _tabula rasa_, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets
so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his
individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of
learning and association with which his poetry is loaded. Such a man
will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not
in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect,
there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of
a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other
{30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.

So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to
be altogether popular either with the authorities or with his
companions. Nor was he, at any rate at first. He had some difference
with his tutor, had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on
very doubtful evidence, to have been flogged. But, whatever his fault
was, it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to
the affair in his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge
inquiry into his Cambridge career. Nor did it injure him permanently
with the authorities. He took his degrees at the earliest possible
dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly
and gratefully of "the more than ordinary respect which I found, above
many of my 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."
The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort:
indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them
for seven years without discovering that he was something above the
ordinary undergraduate. Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as
a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed
to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own
parts." Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real
thing in them they soon compel respect. By the undergraduates Mi