filled every hour of his day, and left no time, even if he had had the
taste, for private study. To teaching, as we shall see, Milton was
far from averse. But then it must be teaching as he understood it, a
teaching which should expand the intellect and raise the character,
not dexterity in playing with the verbal formulae of the disputations
of the schools.

Such an occupation could have no attractions for one who was even now
meditating _Il Penseroso_ (composed 1633). At twenty he had already
confided to his schoolfellow, the younger Gill, the secret of his
discontent with the Cambridge tone. "Here among us," he writes from
college, "are barely one or two who do not flutter off, all unfledged,
into theology, having gotten of philology or of philosophy scarce so
much as a smattering. And for theology they are content with just what
is enough to enable them to patch up a paltry sermon." He retained the
same feeling towards his Alma Mater in 1641, when he wrote (Reason of
Church Government), "Cambridge, which as in the time of her better
health, and mine own younger judgment, I never greatly admired, so now
much less...."

On a review of all these indications of feeling, I should conclude
that Milton never had serious thoughts of a college fellowship, and
that his antipathy arose from a sense of his own incompatibility of
temper with academic life, and was not, like Phineas Fletcher's, the
result of disappointed hopes, and a sense of injury for having been
refused a fellowship at King's. One consideration which remains to be
mentioned would alone be decisive in favour of this view. A fellowship
required orders. Milton had been intended for the church, and had been
sent to college with that view. By the time he left Cambridge, at
twenty-four, it had become clear, both to himself and his family, that