two things, residence in college, with teaching, and orders in the
church. With neither of these two conditions was Milton prepared to
comply. In 1632, when he proceeded to his M.A. degree, Milton was
twenty-four, he had been seven years in college, and had therefore
sufficient experience what college life was like. He who was so
impatient of the "turba legentum prava" in the Bodleian library, could
not have patiently consorted with the vulgar-minded and illiterate
ecclesiastics, who peopled the colleges of that day. Even Mede, though
the author of _Clavis Apocalyptica_ was steeped in the soulless
clericalism of his age, could not support his brother-fellows without
frequent retirements to Balsham, "being not willing to be joined
with such company." To be dependent upon Bainbrigge's (the Master of
Christ's) good pleasure for a supply of pupils; to have to live in
daily intercourse with the Powers and the Chappells, such as we know
them from Mede's letters, was an existence to which only the want
of daily bread could have driven Milton. Happily his father's
circumstances were not such as to make a fellowship pecuniarily an
object to the son. If he longed for "the studious cloister's pale,"
he had been, now for seven years, near enough to college life to
have dispelled the dream that it was a life of lettered leisure and
philosophic retirement. It was just about Milton's time that the
college tutor finally supplanted the university professor, a system
which implied the substitution of excercises performed by the pupil
for instruction given by the teacher. Whatever advantages this system
brought with it, it brought inevitably the degradation of the teacher,
who was thus dispensed from knowledge, having only to attend to
form. The time of the college tutor was engrossed by the details of
scholastic superintendence, and the frivolous worry of academical
business. Admissions, matriculations, disputations, declamations, the
formalities of degrees, public reception of royal and noble visitors,