“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632grounds for patience and hope in her new pregnancy: “This if thou do he [God]
will an offspring give, / That till the world’s last end shall make thy name to live.”
With Virgil’s Fourth “Messianic” Eclogue as a reference point, the expected child
is made to figure Christ who brings redemption and immortal life to faithful Chris-
tians.
Milton again visited London that spring but did not stay long, intending, as he
wrote to Alexander Gil on July 2, to spend most of the long summer vacation in
Cambridge, enjoying “a deeply Literary leisure... in the Cloisters of the Muses.”^48
That sentiment recurs often. Milton sometimes accepts and sometimes explicitly
rejects the role of ascetic, presenting himself as one who enjoys, in rhythmic bal-
ance to arduous study, the refreshment of leisure and refined pleasures.
During his Cambridge years Milton quickly developed what was to be a lifelong
antipathy to the university curriculum, which he blamed for producing ignorant
statesmen, ministers, and citizens.^49 The university is the first of many institutions
Milton would castigate, and in some ways the most fundamental, since he consist-
ently identifies sound education as the basis of all lasting reform. In The Likeliest
Means (1659) he voices a profound disdain, evidently acquired during his college
years, for untalented scholarship students who are turned by the university into
ignorant ministers. The elitism underlying that disdain is clear, but Milton’s stand-
ard is merit and dedication rather than social class as such:
It is well known that the better half of them, and oft times poor and pittiful boyes of
no merit or promising hopes that might intitle them to publick provision but thir
povertie and the unjust favor of friends, have had the most of thir breeding both at
schoole and universitie by schollarships, exhibitions and fellowships at the publick
cost.... [They] seldom continue there till they have well got through Logic, thir first
rudiments;... And those theological disputations there held... rather perplex and
leaven pure doctrin with scholastical trash then enable any minister to the better
preaching of the gospel. (CPW VII, 314–17)He began to criticize, satirize, or denounce the university in his Latin academic
orations known as the Prolusions: the seven that he preserved and published much
later (1674) show him challenging the educational establishment on the very occa-
sions of his assigned college exercises. The Prolusions are of several types: declama-
tions or exercises in rhetorical persuasion (nos. 1, 2, 3, and 7) usually upholding one
side of a topic in debate; disputations or exercises in logical argumentation (4 and
5); and a parody of these kinds (6). In them he often inveighs against the vapid
scholasticism of the curriculum, especially the set disputations on Aristotelian top-
ics, commenting, sometimes with pity, often with scorn, on the ill-educated stu-
dents it produced.
Prolusions I, II, and VI were probably written during Milton’s third year, the
usual time for sophisters (second- and third-year students) to begin public disputa-