dent abilities would be
exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he
evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies
which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his
sole business in life. The record of this survives in the Latin poem
_Ad Patrem_ which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance. It is
an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn
the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts. Why
should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet?
Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine
origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his
father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?

"Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."

The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose
that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's
life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune. How can you,
of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that? You trained
me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father
who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and
Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money
making as the object of life. I have chosen a better part than that:
and you were the inspirer of my choice. And I know that at heart you
agree with it and share it.

The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being
rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of
classical allusion which is the bane of such productions. So far as we
know, it was the last word on its subject. From henceforth no one
questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself. If he ever
afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to
be a still higher call. For the present he lived on quietly at Horton,
near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking
often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed
by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know
from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41}
London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music,
in which sciences I then delighted." Some of these visits to London
evidently lasted days or weeks.

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