“The Childhood Shews the Man” 1608–1625to some Market of Learning” (CPW I, 314). He exchanged poems and literary
critiques with Gil over several years, and expressed his admiration for Gil’s Latin
and Greek poetry, for his judgment as a critic, and for his politics. On the basis of
his collected Latin verse (1632) Anthony à Wood termed the younger Gil “one of
the best Latin poets in the nation.”^31 While Milton was still at Paul’s Gil wrote Latin
and Greek occasional poems and contributed several of them to miscellanies; he
also wrote a virulent poem (1623) celebrating the death of over 90 Roman Catho-
lics when their chapel in Blackfriars collapsed. That poem afforded Milton an ex-
ample close to hand of militant Protestant politics and poetics.^32
Some 30 of Milton’s schoolmates at Paul’s have been identified, among them
Nathaniel Gil, another son of the headmaster, and Henry Myriell, son of the music
publisher Thomas Myriell.^33 But Milton seems to have formed only one close friend-
ship, with Charles Diodati (1609–38). The headnote to his funeral elegy for Diodati
in 1639 emphasizes their special amity based on shared interests: they “had pursued
the same studies” and were “most intimate friends from childhood on.”^34 The Diodatis
were a distinguished Protestant family who became voluntary exiles from Catholic
Italy. Charles’s father, Theodore, was a prominent London physician with patients
at court and in aristocratic families. His uncle was Giovanni Diodati of Geneva, a
well-known Calvinist theologian, Hebraist, promoter of international Protestant
collaboration, and distinguished biblical scholar, known especially for his transla-
tion of the Bible into Italian (1603) and for his Pious Annotations upon the Bible,
published in English translation in 1645. Milton visited him in Geneva in 1639 and
may have met him when he visited England in 1619 and 1627.^35
Charles Diodati entered St Paul’s School in 1617 or 1618; if Milton entered in
1620 they were schoolfellows for three years. Charles, though a few months younger
than Milton, was conspicuously on a faster track: he went to Paul’s earlier and left
earlier, matriculating at Trinity College, Oxford at age 13 (February 7, 1623). Less
than three years later (1625) he graduated AB when Milton was in his first year of
college; and nine months before Milton took his Baccalaureate Diodati received his
Master’s degree (1628). He was an accomplished Latinist and poet who published
an artful Latin poetic tribute to William Camden in 1624, while Milton was still at
school.^36 He seems to have been one of those bright students to whom everything
in the realm of conventional academic expectation comes very easily. Milton ad-
mired and loved Diodati for his virtue, his liveliness, his conversation, his learning,
and his poetry. But Diodati’s precocious accomplishment probably contributed to
Milton’s anxieties about his tardiness in fulfilling his obvious promise.
Milton completed the regular curriculum of studies at Paul’s, which retained
John Colet’s humanist emphasis on pure classical Latin and Greek models for read-
ing, writing, and speaking.^37 He probably covered with his tutor(s) at home the
matter of the first four forms, which would have included the Latin grammar text
by William Lily, first master of Paul’s (mandated by royal authority),^38 Cato’s Disticha
Moralia, Aesop’s Fables, Erasmus’s Colloquies, Caesar for history, Terence’s Com-