JOHN MILTON 4l 
the young Milton learned to play with skill and power. 
He also played on the bass viol, and to the end of his 
days his interest in music never flagged. We may 
suppose that from the father’s genius the son inherited 
that delicate appreciation of vocal sounds which makes 
his poetry the most melodious ever written in English, 
— sometimes rivalled, but never excelled, by Shake- 
speare in his sonnets and in the snatches of song that 
sparkle in his plays. 
In those days, precocious boys were almost always 
intended by their parents for the Church, and such was 
the case with Milton. From his twelfth to his six- 
teenth year he went to the school in St. Paul’s church- 
yard, which the famous reformer Colet had founded 
a century before. At the same time, he read at home 
with a tutor, a canny Scotch Presbyterian, named 
Thomas Young. At the age of sixteen, besides his 
Greek and Latin, Milton had learned French and 
Italian thoroughly, and had made a good beginning in 
Hebrew. Soon after his sixteenth birthday, he entered 
college, but not at Oxford, where his father had studied. 
No reason is assigned for sending him to Cambridge, 
but the reason seems self-evident. The inveterate 
Toryism of Oxford —if I may call it by the word 
which came into use a few years later— must have 
been distasteful to his Puritan family. The eastern 
counties were becoming more and more a hotbed for 
free thinking in religion and politics, probably because 
of their frequent intercourse with the Netherlands. 
- The atmosphere of Cambridge was charged with 
Puritanism and denial of the divine right of kingship ; 
one might have seen there many harbingers of the 
coming storm. Early in 1625 Milton entered Christ’s 
