in his
nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence,
that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and
admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most
ingenious persons of his House." He had, as Wood says, "performed the
collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all." The
power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but
be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for
those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on
his face. It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet.
Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we
still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas _On the Death of a Fair
Infant_, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble
_Ode {36} on the Nativity_ begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though
this is not certain; the pretty little _Song on May Morning_ which one
likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the
rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower
at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to
Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful _Epitaph on the Marchioness of
Winchester_; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on
attaining the age of twenty-three. None of these except the lines on
Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the
volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645. But the fact that those lines
were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory
verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that
Milton was already known as a young poet. There is also a story that
the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary
Cambridge collection. But whether this were so or not (and no such
volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of
Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript
copies. He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and
was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his _Reason of Church
Government_, that, from his early youth, it had been found that,
"whether aught was imposed 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 signs it had,
was likely to