Spenser, and destined to include Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Byron, and Tennyson. Why Oxford was not preferred has been much debated.
The father may have taken advice from the younger Gill, whose Liberalism
had got him into trouble at that University. He may also have been
unwilling to place his son in the neighbourhood of his estranged
relatives. Shortly before Milton's matriculation his sister had married
Mr. Edward Phillips, of the office of the Clerk of the Crown, now
abolished, then charged with the issue of Parliamentary and judicial
writs. From this marriage were to spring the young men who were to find
an instructor in Milton, as he in one of them a biographer.

The external aspect of Milton's Cambridge is probably not ill
represented by Lyne's coloured map of half a century earlier, now
exhibited in the King's Library at the British Museum. Piles of stately
architecture, from King's College Chapel downward, tower all about, over
narrow, tortuous, pebble-paved streets, bordered with diminutive,
white-fronted, red-tiled dwellings, mere dolls' houses in comparison. So
modest, however, is the chartographer's standard, that a flowery Latin
inscription assures the men of Cambridge they need but divert
Trumpington Brook into Clare Ditch to render their town as elegant as
any in the universe. Sheep and swine perambulate the environs, and green
spaces are interspersed among the colleges, sparsely set with trees, so
pollarded as to justify Milton's taunt when in an ill-humour with his
university:--

"Nuda nec arva placent, umbrasque negantia molles,
Quam male Phoebicolis convenit ille locus!"

His own college stands conspicuous at the meeting of three ways, aptly
suggestive of Hecate and infernal things. Its spiritual and intellectual