“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632abstentions and amid charges of undue pressure and a rigged election, the university
votes went for Buckingham by a slight majority^31 and he was duly installed on July
13.
Milton’s second academic year (1626–7) gave large scope to his Latin muse.
Beginning in Michaelmas term, the 17-year-old poet engaged issues of mortality
for the first time. In the aftermath of his trouble with Chappell, he seems to have
been eager to make his mark on the local scene as an accomplished Latin poet, so he
joined other university poets in penning verse tributes to several former and present
Cantabrigians who died that autumn. These four funeral poems – two in elegiacs,
two calling upon other resources of meter and tone – are conventional exercises,
somewhat uneven in quality but nicely suited to their subjects. All of them mix
mythological allusions with Christian motifs.
The most likely order of composition does not exactly correspond to the order
of the deaths. Milton probably wrote Elegy II, “In Obitum Praeconis Academici
Cantabrigiensis,” a 24-line poem for the university beadle Richard Ridding, almost
immediately after his death on September 26, 1626.^32 It is based on a witty conceit,
that the Beadle Death has now summoned one of his own, the university mace-
bearer and cryer. There is no consolation, only the wish that “wailing Elegy” might
fill all the schools with her dirge. The obsequy “In Obitum Procancellarii Medici”
for the vice-chancellor, Dr John Gostlin, master of Caius College and Regius Pro-
fessor of Medicine (d. October 21, 1626) was probably completed next; it is written
in Horatian alcaic stanzas and has a somewhat Horatian tone. Milton placed it first
in the Sylvarum Liber section of his 1645 Poems, with a claim that it was written at
age 16 – impossible, since that was the year before Gostlin died. Leo Miller sug-
gests, plausibly, that the first twenty lines and the last four have no necessary rela-
tion to Gostlin and may well have been written earlier, to compete with Charles
Diodati’s published funeral poem for Camden, also twenty-four lines and also in
alcaic stanzas, which Milton’s poem seems at times to echo.^33 If some part of this
poem was written at age 16, Milton would want to emphasize that fact; he often
exaggerates his own youthfulness, or his poems’ early dates, as a subconscious defense
against his sense of belated achievement. Lines 21–44 make the poem appropriate
to Gostlin, developing the irony that the physician Gostlin could not save himself,
that Death and the Fates have jealously killed one who was all too successful in
helping others elude death. The consolation asks an eternal dwelling in Elysium for
this “glorious shepherd of Pallas’ flock,” but does not answer the harsh question
posed: why does Death take the exceptional and noble with the same stroke as the
ignorant and useless?
The other funeral poems celebrate bishops who had Cambridge connections as
alumni and former fellows and masters. But Milton praises them simply as good men
and is pointedly silent about their episcopal office. Elegy III, for the eminent prelate
Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester (d. September 25, 1626), must have been
written, or at least completed, in early December if the allusions to “clarus dux” and