JOHN CLEVELAND,
The Cavalier poet, born at Loitghborough in Leicestershire in 1613, son of an usher in a free school there, was sent to Milton's College, Christ's, at Cambridge in 1627, when he was fifteen years old. Milton had gone to Christ's two years before, but at the age of seventeen. Cleveland left Christ's College in 1631, when he took his B.A. degree, and went to St. John's, of which he was elected a Fellow in March 1634. He proceeded M.A. in 1634, and studied afterwards both law and physics, living for nine years at Cambridge. John Cleveland was ejected from his position as Fellow and Tutor by the Parliamentary visitors in February 1645 (new style), and was sent to Newark as judge advocate under Sir Richard Willis, the Governor. After the surrender at Newark, Cleveland depended upon friendship of cavaliers who gave him hospitality for his witty companionship, and the good scholarship that made him valuable as a tutor to their sons, Cleveland, who lives among our poets, wrote in the first days of his trouble these three prose Characters:--