s University career. He left Cambridge, as he said
afterwards, "free from all reproach, and approved by all honest men,"
with a purpose of self-dedication "to that same lot, however mean or
high, towards which time leads me and the will of heaven."

[Sidenote: The narrowness of Puritanism.]

Even in the still calm beauty of a life such as this we catch the
sterner tones of the Puritan temper. The very height of the Puritan's
aim, the intensity of his moral concentration, brought with them a loss
of the genial delight in all that was human which gave its charm to the
age of Elizabeth. "If ever God instilled an intense love of moral beauty
into the mind of any man," said the great Puritan poet, "he has
instilled it into mine." "Love Virtue," closed his "Comus," "she alone
is free!" But this passionate love of virtue and of moral beauty, if it
gave strength to human conduct, narrowed human sympathy and human
intelligence. Already in Milton we note "a certain reservedness of
temper," a contempt for "the false estimates of the vulgar," a proud
withdrawal from the meaner and coarser life around him. Great as was his
love for Shakspere, we can hardly fancy him delighting in Falstaff. In
minds of a less cultured order, this moral tension ended, no doubt, in a
hard unsocial sternness of life. The ordinary Puritan "loved all that
were godly, much misliking the wicked and profane." His bond to other
men was not the sense of a common manhood, but the recognition of a
brotherhood among the elect. Without the pale of the saints lay a world
which was hateful to them, because it was the enemy of their God. It is
this utter isolation from the "ungodly" that explains the contrast which
startles us between the inner tenderness of the Puritans and the
ruthlessness of so many of their actions. Cromwell, whose son's death
(in his own words) went to his heart "like a dagger, indeed it did!" and
who rode away sad and wearied from the triumph of Marston Moor, burst
into horse-play as he signed the death-warrant of the king.

[Sidenote: Its extravagance.]

A temper which had lost sympathy with the life of half the world around
it could hardly sympathize with the whole of its own life. Humour, the
faculty which above all corrects exaggeration and extravagance, died
away before the new stress and strain of existence. The absolute
devotion of the Puritan to a Supreme Will tended more and more to rob
him of all sense of measure and proportion in