“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632or latent homosexuality. He concludes this address with a scoffing reference to the
Isle of Ré, recalling the ignominious failure of the English naval expedition under
Buckingham to aid the French Huguenots of La Rochelle (July–October, 1627).
He thereby extends his ridicule to the king’s favorite, who was also the newly
elected chancellor of the university.
Then he ends the exercise on his own terms, shifting suddenly from comic Latin
prose to serious English verse. In that poem, “At a Vacation Exercise in the
Colledge,”^54 he associates himself with Renaissance efforts to promote the vernacu-
lar languages. Invoking the English language itself as his Muse, he proclaims an
abiding devotion and debt to it that reaches back to infancy and forward to those
poems on “graver subjects” that he hopes soon to write: hymns of the heavenly
gods, sacred poems of creation and of nature’s marvels, and especially epic and
romance in the vein of Homer and Spenser – “Kings and Queens and Hero’s old, /
Such as the wise Demodocus once told / In solemn Songs at King Alcinous feast” (ll.
47–9). His turn to English was hardly exclusive: in the next decade he would write
his most accomplished Latin poems. But this is the first of many statements cel-
ebrating his native tongue and the English nation, as well as the first statement of his
poetics. Rejecting the “new fangled toys” and “triming slight” that delight our
“late fantasticks” (the metaphysical style?), Milton proposes to clothe his “naked
thoughts” with the “richest Robes, and gay’st attire” the English language can
provide (ll. 19–23). The poem embodies this poetics with its graceful Jonsonian
couplets and Spenserian imagery and sonorities; at moments it also foreshadows the
Miltonic sublimity to come.
Milton preserved only about forty lines in English heroic couplets from the alle-
gorical entertainment he devised for this festival occasion; “the rest was Prose,” his
1673 text explains. He himself took the part of the Aristotelian Absolute Being, or
Ens, presenting his “sons,” the ten Predicaments of Being: Substance, Quantity,
Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, Possession, Action, and Passion.^55 The
poem incorporates a sonorous catalogue of English rivers recalling Spenser’s wed-
ding of Thames and Medway and Drayton’s Polyolbion. This entertainment, suited
aptly to its occasion, was useful apprentice work for Arcades and Comus.
On July 21 Milton accepted an invitation to visit his former tutor Thomas Young,
recently returned to England and settled into a living at Stowmarket: “I shall come
with pleasure, to enjoy the delights of the season and, no less, the delights of your
conversation” (CPW I, 315). Their conversations and Milton’s reflections that sum-
mer no doubt turned often to national events: the king’s signing (after long resist-
ance) of the Petition of Right (June 7); the appointment of the Arminian
Anglo-Catholic William Laud as Bishop of London (July, 1628) with all that por-
tended for the Romanizing direction of the English church; and the assassination of
the king’s favorite, Buckingham (August 23). Milton’s friend, Alexander Gil,
promptly got himself into deep trouble for toasting the assassination and writing
brazenly injudicious verses that termed Buckingham a Ganymede to King James