wine perambulate the environs, and green
spaces are interspersed among the colleges, sparsely set with trees, so
pollarded as to justify Milton's taunt when in an ill-humour with his
university:--

"Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles,
Quam male Phoebicolis convenit ille locus!"

His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly
suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual
physiognomy, and that of the university in general, must be learned from
the exhaustive pages of Professor Masson. A book unpublished when he
wrote, Ball's life of Dr. John Preston, Master of Emmanuel, vestige of
an entire continent of submerged Puritanism, also contributes much to
the appreciation of the place and time. We can here but briefly
characterize the University as an institution undergoing modification,
rather by the decay of the old than by the intrusion of the new. The
revolution by which mathematics became the principal instrument of
culture was still to be deferred forty years. Milton, who tells us that
he delighted in mathematics, might have been nearly ignorant of that
subject if he pleased, and hardly could become proficient in it by the
help of his Alma Mater. The scholastic philosophy, however, still
reigned. But even here tradition was shaky and undermined; and in
matters of discipline the rigid code which nominally governed the
University was practically much relaxed. The teaching staff was
respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops. But
while the academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable,
perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the Spirit.
No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree capable
of arousing enthusiasm. It might not indeed have been easy for a Newman
or a Green to captivate the independent soul of Milton, even at this
susceptible period of his life; failing any approach to such external
influence, he would be likely to leave Cambridge the same man as he
entered it. Ere, indeed, he had completed a year's residence, his
studies were interrupted by a temporary rupture with the University,
probably attributable to his having been at first placed under an
uncongenial tutor. William Chappell was an Arminian and a tool of Laud,
who afterwards procured him preferment in Ireland, and, as Professor
Masson judges from his treatise on homiletics, "a man of dry, meagre
nature." His r