woman waits.  She sits very straight in her chair, her worn hands are folded, her eyes heavy with sleep.  Sometimes she nods.  Then with a start she shakes herself wide awake again, murmuring softly that it is no hour for any Christian body to be out o’ bed, wondering that her master should allow so young a child to keep so long over his books.  Still she has her orders, so with a patient sigh she folds her hands again and waits.  Thus early did Milton begin to shape his own course and to live a life apart from others.

Aubrey.

At sixteen Milton went to Christ’s College, Cambridge.  And here he earned for himself the name of the Lady of Christ’s, both because of his beautiful face and slender figure, and because he stood haughtily aloof from amusements which seemed to him coarse or bad.  In going to Cambridge, Milton had meant to study for the Church.  But all through life he stood for liberty.  “He thought that man was made only for rebellion,” said a later writer.* As a child he had gone his own way, and as he grew older he found it harder and harder to agree with all that the Church taught—­“till coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded in the Church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slaves, and take an oath withal. . . .  I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.”  Thus was he, he says, “church-outed by the Prelates."* Milton could not, with a free conscience, become a clergyman, so having taken his degree he went home to his father, who now lived in the country at Horton.  He left Cambridge without regrets.  No thrill of pleasure seemed to have warmed his heart in after days when he looked back upon the young years spent beside the Cam.

The Reason of Church Government, book II.

Milton went home to his father’s house without any settled plan of life.  He had not made up his mind what he was to be, he was only sure that he could not be a clergyman.  His father was well off, but not wealthy.  He had no great estates to manage, and he must have wished his eldest son to do and be something in the world, yet he did not urge it upon him.  Milton himself, however, was not quite at rest, as his sonnet On his being arrived to the age of twenty-three shows:—­

    “How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
    Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year: 
    My hasting days fly on with full career,
    But my late Spring no bud or blossom show’th. 
    Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
    That I to manhood am arriv’d so near,
    And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
    That some more timely happy spirits endu’th. 
    Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
    It shall be still in strictest measure even
    To that same lot, however mean, or high,
    Toward which Time leads me; and the Will of Heaven;
    All is, if I have grace to use it so,
    As ever in my great Task-Master’s eye.”