ng the incidents of Milton's life at St. Paul's School should not be
forgotten his friendship with Charles Diodati, the son of a Genevese
physician settled in England, whose father had been exiled from Italy
for his Protestantism. A friendship memorable not only as Milton's
tenderest and his first, but as one which quickened his instinctive love
of Italian literature, enhanced the pleasure, if it did not suggest the
undertaking, of his Italian pilgrimage, and doubtless helped to inspire
the execration which he launched in after years against the slayers of
the Vaudois. The Italian language is named by him among three which,
about the time of his migration to the University, he had added to the
classical and the vernacular, the other two being French and Hebrew. It
has been remarked, however, that his use of "Penseroso," incorrect both
in orthography and signification, shows that prior to his visit to Italy
he was unacquainted with the niceties of the language. He entered as "a
lesser pensioner" at Christ's College, Cambridge, on February 12, 1625;
the greatest poetic name in an University roll already including
Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.
The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose Liberalism
had got him into trouble at that University. He may also have been
unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his estranged
relatives. Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had married
Mr. Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown, now
abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and judicial
writs. From this marriage were to spring the young men who were to find
an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.

The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill
represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now
exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately
architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about, over
narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive,
white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison. So
modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery Latin
inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert
Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as
any in the universe. Sheep and s