academical exercises; his skill in Italian marks a degree of culture unknown even in that Italianised age. In addition to his scholarship, he possessed extraordinary personal beauty, which gives him among poets something of that eminence possessed by Raffaelle among painters. We are told that he was called the “Lady of the College.” And, while at Christ’s, he wrote some of his most lasting works, including the famous Hymn on the Nativity, which was written in 1629. His verses on Hobson, the University carrier, are well known, and _Lycidas_, the elegy on his college friend, Edward King, appeared at Cambridge in 1637. His noble _Verses at a Solemn Musick_, containing some of the finest and most imaginative lines in English, belong to this early period. The master under whom his residence took place was Dr Thomas Bainbrigge, master from 1620 to 1645. Cromwell had gone down from Sidney before Milton came up to Christ’s, but he was still in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. Milton’s mulberry-tree, the Palladium of the college, may or may not be Milton’s; but to believe the tradition does no violence to our faith. The memory of Milton had a more than usually potent influence on another poet, Wordsworth. Among the band of my compeers was one Whom chance had stationed in the very room Honoured by Milton’s name. O temperate Bard! Be it confest that, for the first time, seated Within thy innocent lodge and oratory, One of a festive circle, I poured out Libations, to thy memory drank, till pride And gratitude grew dizzy in a brain Never excited by the fumes of wine Before that hour, or since. And this, from internal evidence, must have been on a winter Sunday afternoon before chapel! For the inebriated poet, always a sad idler at Cambridge, had to run back “ostrich-like” to chapel, where he arrived late and, full of wine and Milton, swaggered up to his place through “the inferior throng of plain Burghers.” Here was a young gentleman who deserved flogging!