In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold himself, the future author of _Paradise Lost_ went into residence at Cambridge where he remained for seven years. The college that can boast his name among its members is Christ's. Unlike so many poets he had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and evidently made an impression on his contemporaries. No doubt the strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with genius. From the beginning he had the passion of the student. He says of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father "ordered the maid to sit up for him." And his studies were in the main the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of them. All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning, and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business of scholarship to maintain. Radical and rebel as he was in politics and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always the exact opposite in his art. There he never attempted the method of the _tabula rasa_, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets so barren. The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of learning and association with which his poetry is loaded. Such a man will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect, there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other {30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.