and Aubrey charges him with unkindness, a vague accusation rendered
tangible by the interlined gloss, "Whipt him." Hence the legend, so dear
to Johnson, that Milton was the last man to be flogged at college. But
Aubrey can hardly mean anything more than that Chappell on some occasion
struck or beat his pupil, and this interpretation is supported by
Milton's verses to Diodati, written in the spring of 1626, in which,
while acknowledging that he had been directed to withdraw from Cambridge
("_nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor_") he expresses his intention
of speedily returning:--

"Stat quoque juncosas Cami remeare paludes,
Atque iterum raucae murmur adire scholae."

A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be
likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a
scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly
his. Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication
unnecessary. That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears
from his not having been mulcted of a term's residence, his absence
notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell
lost his pupil. His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his
patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned "excellent talent."
What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.

This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton's University
life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course. Had it
indeed implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in
either case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his
subsequent career. He went steadily through the academic course, which
to attain the degree of Master of Arts, then required seven years'