he schoolmate whom Milton most loved was a physician’s son, Charles Diodati, almost exactly his own age, who went to Cambridge a little in advance of him.

After his sister, who was then eighteen years old, had been wooed and won by Mr. Philips, and had made the first break in the home on Spread Eagle Court, Milton, now sixteen years old, followed his friend to Cambridge. Doubtless he rode on the coach, which every week the hale old stage-coach driver—Hobson—drove from the Bull’s Inn on Bishopsgate Street. A well-to-do man was this worthy, who, in spite of eighty winters, still cracked his whip behind his span, and kept forty horses in his livery stable. Milton took a great fancy to him. He soon learned, as did every young gentleman intent on hiring a nag, that “Hobson’s choice” meant taking the horse that stood nearest the stable door. Hobson is said to have been the first man in England to let out hackney-coaches. The modern visitor to the university town finds the old carrier honoured by a memorial; for he became a public benefactor, and among many generous gifts bequeathed a sum that to this day provides for a fine conduit and for the runnels of sparkling water that flow along the streets and around the town.[1]

Under the mastership of Doctor Thomas Bainbrigge, Milton became a “lesser pensioner” in February, 1624, at Christ’s College. Students were classified according to social rank and ability to pay, and Milton stood above the poorer students, called “sizars,” who had inferior accommodation; he probably paid about £50 a year for his maintenance. Christ’s College, as regards numbers, then stood nearly at the head of the sixteen colleges and had one master, thirteen fellows, and fifty-five scholars, which, together with students, made the number two hundred and sixty, about the same that it has to-day. It stands between Sidney Sussex College and Emmanuel. In the former, Cromwell studied, from April, 1616, to July, 1617, and the room with its bay window and deep window-seats and little bedroom opening out of it, which is said to have been his, may still be seen in the second story of the building next to the street. The window is modern. His portrait, painted in middle life, hangs in the dining-hall. Doctor William Everett, in what is the best book on life in Cambridge,—his “On the Cam,”—thus sums up his estimate of the Protector: “Bigots may defame him, tyrants may insult him, but when the hosts of God rise for their great review and the champions of liberty bear their scars, there shall stand in the foremost rank, shining as the brightness of the firmament, the majestic son of Cambridge, the avenger and protector, Oliver Cromwell.” A Royalist has written in a note that is appended to Cromwell’s name in the college books: “Hic fuit grandis ille impostor carnifex perditissimus;” and it is as “impostor” and “butcher” that two-thirds of Englishmen would have described him before Carlyle resurrected the real man.

Emmanuel College is preëminently the Puritan college. It is dear to Americans as the one where William Blackstone, the learned hermit of Shawmut, John Harvard, the founder of Harvard College, and Henry Dunster, its first president, Bradstreet, the colonial governor, and Hugh Peters, the regicide, who lived in Boston, once studied. Here also Thomas Hooker, the founder of Connecticut, was a student, and here John Cotton was a fellow. This beloved preacher afterward left his ministry over St. Botolph’s Church in Boston, England, to go to the little settlement of Winthrop’s, which had changed its earlier names of “Shawmut” and “Trimountaine” to “Boston” before his arrival. American tourists, who find their way to the spacious grounds of Jesus College to see the Burne-Jones and Morris windows in the chapel, will be glad to note that in these stately halls John Eliot walked a student. Little he then dreamed of his future life in wigwams, a guest of mugwumps, in the forests of Natick, Massachusetts, and of the laborious years to be spent in turning Hebrew poetry and history and gospel message into their barbarous tongue. Francis Higginson, the minister to Salem, and the ancestor of Colonel Thomas W. Higginson, studied here as well. John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts colony, and President Chauncy of Harvard College studied at Trinity a generation before Wren erected its great library, and Isaac Newton was a student there. John Norton, Cotton’s successor at the First Church, Boston, studied in Peterhouse, the oldest of all the colleges, and Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, entered Pembroke College the year before Milton entered Christ’s. Whether the two, whose lives were to touch so closely later, knew each other then or not is doubtful. William Brewster was the only man who came in the Mayflower who had a college education. He too studied at Cambridge; and so did John Robinson, the dearly loved pastor of the Pilgrims, who remained with the other English refugees at Leyden.

It was these men, with Shepard, Saltonstall, and a score more of Oxford and Cambridge men, who were the spiritual fathers of Samuel Adams, Warren, Otis, Hancock; of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks; of Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Holmes, and Hawthorne; of Garrison, Phillips, and Sumner; of Motley, Bancroft, Prescott, and John Fiske. The Cambridge that Milton knew was the mother and the grandmother of the founders of states and of the architects of national constitutions and ideals.

Though most of the New England Puritan leaders came from Cambridge, Oxford furnished several of the great Puritans who remained at home—Pym, Vane, John Eliot, and Hampden.

It is estimated that nearly one hundred university men, between 1630 and 1647, left their comfortable homes and the allurements that Oxford, Cambridge, and the picturesque England of their time presented, to undergo the hardships of pioneers in the raw colony upon Massachusetts Bay. Of these, two-thirds came from Cambridge, a particularly large proportion from Emmanuel College. Of the forty or fifty Cambridge or Oxford men who were in Massachusetts in 1639, one-half were within five miles of Boston or Cambridge. It was this element of culture and character that determined the history of New England, and forced its stony soil to bring forth such a crop of men in the ages that were to come as made New England, in the words of Maurice, “the realisation in plain prose of the dreams which haunted Milton his whole life long.”

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