Opposite St. John’s Chapel is the little round church of the Holy Sepulchre. This is the earliest of the four churches in England built by the Templars which still remain. It is similar to the Temple church in London, and was probably begun a little later than St. Benedict’s, which has just been mentioned. It is questionable whether the students of Milton’s college days appreciated the beauty of this beautiful remnant of the Norman period that was in their midst. The taste of that day was decidedly for architecture of the Renaissance type, of which Cambridge boasts many examples.
In Milton’s time the most beautiful quadrangle in Cambridge, and perhaps in the world, that of Trinity, had been but newly finished by the architect, Ralph Symons, who altered and harmonised a group of older buildings. In the centre of the court is Neville’s fountain, built in 1602, which is a fine example of good English Renaissance work. During four years of Milton’s residence, part of St. John’s College was in process of erection in the Italian Gothic style. This was at the expense of the Lord Keeper Williams, whose initials and the date, 1624, are lettered in white stone near the western oriel. It was completed in 1628. Clare Bridge was not finished until 1640, and most of the other beautiful bridges that span the Cam to-day were unknown to Milton when he mused beside its shady banks where
“Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow,
His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge
Like to that sanguine flower inscribed with woe.”
Only fifteen miles away, across the level fields, lay Ely Cathedral, built on what was once hardly more than an island in the Fens. Many a time during his seven years in the university town must Milton have walked over there, or ridden on one of Hobson’s horses, perhaps with his dear Charles Diodati, to view the mighty structure, or to study its Norman interior. Its gray towers and octagonal lantern dominate the little town that clusters around it, and may be seen from far across the plain.
During these studious years, while Milton walked among the colleges where Chaucer, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and Erasmus had likewise walked as students, he was not only busied with logic, philosophy, and the literature of half a dozen living and dead languages, but his tender emotions seem to have been briefly touched by some unknown fair one; and his interest in public matters, for instance, Sir John Eliot’s imprisonment in the Tower, is evident. In one letter he mentions the execution of a child but nine years old, for setting fire to houses. A scourge of the plague afflicted London on the year that he entered Cambridge, and five years later he was driven from town by its devastation there. The university ceased all exercises, and the few members of it that remained shut themselves in as close prisoners. So great was the poverty and suffering incident to this calamity, that the king appealed to the country for aid to the stricken town.
During these years of quiet growth, Milton’s first noteworthy poems appear, of which the Latin poems, according to good judges, deserve the preference. We here mention only some of his English poems. The longest of these, which was written the month and year when he came to his majority, was begun on Christmas morning, 1629. This serious youth of twenty-one longed to give “a birthday gift for Christ,” and thus appeared his poem, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” Three or four years earlier he had written on the death of his baby niece, Mrs. Philips’s child, his lines “On the Death of a Fair Infant.” The revelation of self in his sonnet “On His Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-Three,” makes the latter the most interesting of these early flights of song.
The most precious literary treasure which Cambridge possesses, and as Mr. Edmund Gosse asserts, “the most precious manuscript of English literature in the world,” is the packet of thirty loose and ragged folio leaves covered with Milton’s handwriting, which since 1691 has lain in Trinity College Library. For a generation, they attracted no attention, but later they were examined and handled by so many that they suffered seriously; within fifty years, seventeen lines of “Comus” were torn out and stolen by some unknown thief. Mr. Gosse, in a delightful article in the Atlantic Monthly, upon “The Milton Manuscripts at Cambridge,” gives reins to his imagination in picturing the sudden temptation of this man, who, passing down the long ranges of “storied urn and animated bust,” which adorn the interior of Wren’s famous structure, advances beyond the beautiful figure of the youthful Byron to the gorgeous window in which the form of Isaac Newton shines resplendent. The careless attendant places in his hands the richly bound thin folio,—“and now the devil is raging in the visitor’s bosom; the collector awakens in him, the bibliomaniac is unchained. In an instant the unpremeditated crime is committed.... And so he goes back to his own place certain that sooner or later his insane crime will be discovered ... certain of silent infamy and unaccusing outlawry, with no consolation but that sickening fragment of torn verse which he can never show to a single friend, can never sell nor give nor bequeath. Among literary criminals, I know not another who so burdens the imagination as this wretched mutilator of ‘Comus.’” These pages are the laboratory or studio of the poet, and reveal most interestingly the progress of his art during his earlier creative years. Like Beethoven’s note-book, they teach the impatient and inaccurate that genius condescends carefully to note little things and to take infinite pains, whether it be with symphonies or sonnets. Charles Lamb, on looking over the Milton manuscripts, whimsically recorded his astonishment that these lines had not fallen perfect and polished from the poet’s pen. “How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore! interlined, corrected! as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure!” But the average man, who despairs of ever attaining artistic excellence, and finds every kind of literary composition a formidable task, takes consolation in the fact here revealed, that even the creator of “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” before he reached the perfect phrase,—“endless morn of light,”—experimented with no less than six others: “ever-endless light,” “ever glorious,” “uneclipsèd,” “where day dwells without night,” and “in cloudless birth of night.” The authorities of Trinity College, having of late realised the invaluable service to men of letters that this glimpse into the poet’s workshop would be, have issued a limited edition, in sumptuous form, of a perfect facsimile of the Milton manuscripts. “Now, for the first time,” as Mr. Gosse remarks, “we can examine in peace, and without a beating heart and blinded eyes, the priceless thing in its minutest features.” When it is remembered that no line of Shakespeare’s remains in his own handwriting, and nothing of any consequence of Chaucer’s or Spenser’s, Mr. Gosse cannot be accused of over-statement when he says that to all lovers of literature this volume is “a relic of inestimable value. To those who are practically interested in the art of verse, it reads a more pregnant lesson than any other similar document in the world.”
Some day the great university may add to its charms not only an adequate memorial to its Puritans, but one to its poets—Spenser, Milton, Pope, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, and Tennyson, who have enriched it by their presence, and have made Cambridge par excellence the university of the poets. It must be remembered that Chaucer and Shakespeare were not university men.
The time for a pilgrimage to Cambridge is term time, when window-boxes, gay with blossoms, brighten gray old walls within the “quads,” and when the streets are enlivened by three thousand favoured youths intent on outdoor sport. Then all points of interest are accessible, and perchance one may be so fortunate as to get entrance up narrow, worn stone stairways into some student’s cosy study; the visitor will find it lined with books, rackets, and boxing-gloves, and decorated with trophies and photographs of some one else’s sister. Bits of college gossip and local slang, hints of college traditions, prejudices, and customs pleasantly vary the tourist’s hours spent over the fine print of Baedeker and in search for the tombs of eminent founders.
Even if one is a tourist and not a “fresher,” he will find it profitable to study contemporary Cambridge through “The Fresher’s Don’t,” written by “A Sympathiser, B. A.,” and addressed to freshers “in all courtesy.” As to dress, the “fresher,” among other pieces of sage advice, is told: “Don’t forget to cut the tassel of your cap just level with the board. Only graduates wear long tassels.”