And his "reasonings, together with a
certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem
either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call
pride) . . . 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." And in repudiating an impudently false charge
against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his
own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained. "Having had
the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high
mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord
and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,--that, if
unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34}
such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the
image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be
much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . . Thus large I have
purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it
may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."

Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself,
conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who
would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable
things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no
doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth
century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years
later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the
single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth.
When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect,
though probably not popularity. The tone of the sixth of the academic
Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published
in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular,
he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous
discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering
which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering. He says that
"nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after
allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name
aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described
without obvious absurdity.

We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration