“Studious Retirement” 1632–1638brother and looked for him in his old haunts without success. He chides Diodati for
failing to keep his promise to visit Horton, and urges him to settle someplace where
they might “visit each other, at least sometimes.” The letter’s tone does not suggest
a falling out, only the problems of distance and the call of other worries and du-
ties.^70 In excusing his own remissness Milton refers, as he had so often, to their
differences in temperament and habits, and offers an illuminating insight into his
own method of study:
I am naturally slow and lazy to write, as you well know; whereas you on the other
hand, whether by nature or by habit, can usually be drawn into this sort of Corre-
spondence with ease. At the same time it is in my favor that your habit of studying
permits you to pause frequently, visit friends, write much, and sometimes make a
journey. But my temperament allows no delay, no rest, no anxiety – or at least thought- about scarcely anything to distract me, until I attain my object and complete some
great period, as it were, of my studies. And wholly for this reason, not another please,
has it happened that I undertake even courtesies more tardily than you. (CPW I,
323–4)
This statement may also go far to explain his poetic silence in these years, and at
some later periods: if he could not interrupt a cycle of studies to write letters, he
could hardly allow the far greater distraction of writing poetry.
Diodati’s answer (now lost) evidently reported that he had completed his ap-
prenticeship and was practicing medicine somewhere in the North. Milton’s reply
of November 23, also in Latin and posted from London, plays wittily with Diodati’s
new conquest of the “citadel of Medicine,” and predicts fame for him in that
endeavor. Chiding him for involvement with domestic matters^71 to the exclusion
of “urban companionships,” Milton urges him to “at least make your winter quar-
ters with us” – presumably in London, where Milton is thinking of moving to
escape from his country isolation:
I shall now tell you seriously what I am planning: to move into one of the Inns of
Court, wherever there is a pleasant and shady walk; for that dwelling will be more
satisfactory, both for companionship, if I wish to remain at home, and as a more
suitable headquarters, if I choose to venture forth. Where I am now, as you know, I
live in obscurity and cramped quarters. (CPW I, 327)Milton is not thinking of law as a profession, but of following the course taken by
many young gentlemen: residing at the Inns of Court to make contacts and im-
prove chances of preferment.
In this letter Milton seeks to explain himself to his dearest friend in language
suffused with his readings of Plato. He virtually conflates his love for Diodati’s
beauty of spirit with his own desire to create poetry worthy of fame, and grounds
both in his very nature as a lover of the Platonic Idea of the Beautiful: