CHRIST’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
A, Chapel; B, Library; C, Dining-Hall; D, Head Master’s Rooms; E, Kitchen; F, Master’s Garden; H, Tennis Court.
From an old engraving.
Sidney Sussex, Christ’s, and Emmanuel Colleges were erected during the Tudor period, Christ’s College, founded in 1505, being the earliest of the three. The buildings of the latter now present a more commonplace appearance than when the “Lady of Christ’s,” as the students called young Milton, walked among them in his cap and gown. One still may climb the narrow, shabby stairway to the room, with a tiny, irregular bedroom and cupboard, where Milton lived, and which probably he shared with a roommate. It has no inscription or special mark, and probably few strangers seek it out. The visitor will note its two windows opposite each other, whose heavy window-frames, with the wainscoting and cornice, bear mark of age.
No one, however, fails to seek within the secluded inner garden the decrepit mulberry-tree, which is said to have been planted by Milton. Its trunk is muffled high in a mound of sod, and its aged limbs, which still bear foliage and black berries, rest on supports. High, sheltering walls shut in the exquisite green lawns around it, and birds, blossoms, and trees make the spot seem a paradise regained.
Among the students of Christ’s College, none in later years brought it such renown as two men of widely differing types—the authors of “Evidences of Christianity” and “The Origin of Species.” William Paley in 1766, when he was but twenty-three years old, was elected a fellow, and remained in Cambridge ten years. His famous work to-day forms part of the subjects required for the “Little Go.” Charles Robert Darwin, the Copernicus of the nineteenth century, entered Christ’s with the intention of studying for the ministry. He left it to journey on the Beagle through the southern seas, and to bring back results which, with his later study, led to such a revolution in human thought as made it only second to that wrought in the minds of men who lived a generation before Milton was born.
Masson tells us that in Milton’s college days the daily routine was chapel service at five o’clock in the morning, followed sometimes by a discourse by one of the fellows, then breakfasts, probably served in the students’ own rooms, as they are to-day. This was followed by the daily college lectures or university debates, which lasted until noon, when dinner was served in the college dining-halls; there the young men, then as now, sat upon the hard, backless benches, and drank their beer beneath painted windows and portraits, perchance by Holbein, of the eminent men who had been their predecessors.
After dinner, if they supped at seven, and attended evening service, they could do much as they pleased otherwise. In Milton’s day, the rule of an earlier time, which prescribed that out of their chambers students should converse in some dead language, had been much relaxed. Probably the barbarous Latin and worse Greek and Hebrew, which this prescription must have caused, finally rendered it a dead letter. Smoking was a universal practice, and boxing matches, dancing, bear fights, and other forbidden games were not unknown. Bathing in the sedgy little Cam was prohibited, but was nevertheless a daily practice.
In many colleges the undergraduates wore “new fashioned gowns of any colour whatsoever, blue or green, or red or mixt, without any uniformity but in hanging sleeves; and their other garments light and gay, some with boots and spurs, others with stockings of divers colours reversed one upon another.” Some had “fair roses upon the shoe, long frizzled hair upon the head, broad spread bands upon their shoulders, and long, large merchants’ ruffs about their necks, with fair feminine cuffs at the wrist.”
The portrait of Milton, which hangs in a spacious apartment used by the dons at Christ’s College, shows him a youth of rare beauty, in a rich and tasteful costume with broad lace collar. He holds a gilt-edged volume in his hand, and has the mien of a refined and elegant scholar, but not effeminate withal, for he was used to daily sword practice.