scunt
majora_). Thou hast neither made me a merchant nor a barrister":--

"Neque enim, pater, ire jubebas
Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri,
Certaque condendi fulget spes aurea nummi:
Nec rapis ad leges, male custoditaque gentis
Jura, nec insulsis damnas clamoribus aures."

The stroke at the subserviency of the lawyers to the Crown (_male
custodita jura gentis_) would be appreciated by the elder Milton, nor
can we doubt that the old Puritan fully approved his son's resilience
from a church denied by Arminianism and prelacy. He would not so easily
understand the dedication of a life to poetry, and the poem from which
the above citation is taken seems to have been partly composed to smooth
his repugnance away. He was soon to have stronger proofs that his son
had not mistaken his vocation: it would be pleasant to be assured that
the old man was capable of valuing "Comus" and "Lycidas" at their worth.
The circumstances under which "Comus" was produced, and its subsequent
publication with the extorted consent of the author, show that Milton
did not wholly want encouragement and sympathy. The insertion of his
lines on Shakespeare in the Second Folio (1632) also denotes some
reputation as a wit. In the main, however, remote from urban circles and
literary cliques, with few correspondents and no second self in
sweetheart or friend, he must have led a solitary intellectual life,
alone with his great ambition, and probably pitied by his acquaintance.
"The world," says Emerson to the Poet, "is full of renunciations and
apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and a
churl for a long season. This is the screen and sheath in which Pan has
protected his well-beloved flower." The special nature of Milton's
studies cannot now be exactly ascertained. Of his manner of studying he
informs Diodati, "No delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of
anything holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for, and round
off, as it were, some great period of my studies." Of his object he
says: "God has instilled into me, at all events, a vehement love of the
beautiful. Not with so much labour is Ceres said to have sought
Proserpine as I am wont day and night to seek for the idea of the
beautiful through all the forms and faces of things, and to follow it
leading me on as with certain assured traces." We may be sure that he
read the classics of all the languages which he understood. His