“Cambridge... for Seven Years” 1625–1632and King Charles, “the old fool and the young one.” In November the Court of
Star Chamber degraded Gil from his ministry and his Oxford degrees, fined him
£2,000, and sentenced him to lose both his ears. At the petition of his father and
powerful friends the physical mutilation was remitted, but Gil remained in prison
for over two years.^56 This episode brought home to Milton the costs of
antimonarchical satire, and surely reinforced his growing antipathy for the Stuart
court.
Prolusion III, “An Attack on the Scholastic Philosophy,” was most likely deliv-
ered in the Public Schools of the university sometime during Milton’s final under-
graduate year, 1628–9. The topic may have been set and Milton assigned the negative,
but the vehemence with which he attacked the chief business of Cambridge under-
graduate education may point to the basis of his earlier trouble with Chappell, that
renowned controversialist. Now, in the wake of his role in the recent vacation
festivities, he presented himself as spokesman for a (no longer hostile) student audi-
ence. Directly challenging the sterile scholasticism of the academic establishment
with its enthronement of Aristotle as primary authority in all areas, he describes his
own intense boredom with it as an index of common student experience:
If I can at all judge your feelings by my own, what pleasure can there possibly be in
the petty disputations of sour old men.... Many a time, when the duty of tracing out
these petty subtleties for a while has been laid upon me, when my mind has been
dulled and my sight blurred by continued reading... how often have I wished that
instead of having these fooleries forced upon me, I had been set to clean out the stable
of Augeas again. (CPW I, 241–2)Emphasizing his own case, he underscores the antipathy between these arid studies
and those fostered by the Muses:
Believe me, my learned friends, when I go through these empty quibbles as I often
must, against my will, it seems to me as if I were forcing my way through rough and
rocky wastes, desolate wildernesses, and precipitous mountain gorges. And so it is not
likely that the dainty and elegant Muses preside over these ragged and tattered studies,
or consent to be the patrons of their maudlin partisans. (CPW I, 243)His scorn breaks through as he challenges his fellow students to recognize how
they are being duped and blighted by this curriculum:
The supreme result of all this earnest labour is to make you a more finished fool and
cleverer contriver of conceits, and to endow you with a more expert ignorance: and
no wonder, since all these problems at which you have been working in such torment
and anxiety have no existence in reality at all, but like unreal ghosts and phantoms
without substance obsess minds already disordered and empty of all true wisdom.
(CPW I, 245)