Mr. Young’s claim to fame rests on something greater than his sermon, or his position in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, or his mastership of Jesus College. He was, as we have said, Milton’s schoolmaster. The poet tells us:
‘’Tis education forms the common mind;
Just as a twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’
If so, much of Milton’s piety and lofty principle and massive learning must have come to him from the Stowmarket Vicar. In our day there is little chance of a young scholar becoming imbued with Miltonian ideas on the subject of civil and religious
liberty. That sublime genius which was to sing in immortal verse of
‘Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,’
must have owed much to Dr. Young—a debt which the poet acknowledged, as we have already seen, in no niggardly way. Amongst Milton’s Latin letters is the following, which has been translated by Professor Masson thus: ‘Although I had resolved with myself, most excellent preceptor, to send you a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers, yet I did not consider that I had done enough unless I also wrote something in prose: for, truly, the singular and boundless gratitude of my mind which your deserts justly claim from me was not to be expressed in that cramped mode of speech, straitened by fixed feet and syllables, but in a free oration—nay, rather, if it were possible, in an Asiatic exuberance of words. To express sufficiently how much I owe you, were a work far greater than my strength, even if I should call into play all those commonplaces of argument which Aristotle or that dialectician of Paris (Ramus) has collected, or even if I should exhaust all the fountains of oratory. You complain
as justly that my letters have been to you very few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable, as I rejoice, and all but exult, at having such a place in your friendship, as that you should care to ask for frequent letters from me. That I should never have written to you for over more than three years, I pray you will not misconceive, but, in accordance with your wonderful indulgence and candour, put the more charitable construction on it; for I call God to witness how much, as a father, I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always followed you in thought, and how I feared to trouble you with my writings. In sooth, I make it my first care, that since there is nothing else to commend my letters, that their rarity may commend them. Next, as out of that most vehement desire after you which I feel, I always fancy you with me, and speak to you, and beheld you as if you were present, and so, as always happens in love, soothe my grief by a certain vain imagination of your presence, it is, in truth, my fear, as soon as I meditate sending you a letter, that it should suddenly come into my mind by what an interval of earth you are distant from me, and so the grief of your absence, already
nearly lulled, should grow fresh and break up my sweet dream. The Hebrew Bible, your truly most acceptable gift, I have already received. These lines I have written in London, in the midst of town distractions, not, as usual, surrounded by books; if, therefore, anything in this epistle should please you less than might be, and disappoint your expectations, it will be made up for by another more elaborate one as soon as I have returned to the haunts of the Muses.’
When the above letter was written, Milton had become a Cambridge student, where he was to experience a new kind of tutor. Milton could not get on with Chappell as he did with Young. The tie between the Stowmarket Vicar and the poet was of a much more cordial character.
Again the poet appears to have forwarded the following letter to the Stowmarket Vicarage. It is to be feared that few such precious epistles find their way there now. Milton writes to the Doctor: ‘On looking at your letter, most excellent preceptor, this alone struck me as superfluous, that you excused your slowness in writing; for though nothing could come to me more desirable than your letters, how could I or ought I to hope that you should have so much leisure from serious and