A. of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who was
"esteemed to have such an excellent way of training up youth, that
none in his time went beyond it." The private tutor was Thomas Young,
who was, or had been, curate to Mr. Gataker, of Rotherhithe, itself
a certificate of merit, even if we had not the pupil's emphatic
testimony of gratitude. Milton's fourth elegy is addressed to Young,
when, in 1627, he was settled at Hamburg, crediting him with having
first infused into his pupil a taste for classic literature and
poetry. Biographers have derived Milton's Presbyterianism in 1641 from
the lessons twenty years before of this Thomas Young, a Scotchman,
and one of the authors of the _Smectymnuus_. This, however, is a
misreading of Milton's mind--a mind which was an organic whole--"whose
seed was in itself," self-determined; not one whose opinions can be
accounted for by contagion or casual impact.
Of Milton's boyish exercises two have bean preserved. They are English
paraphrases of two of the Davidic Psalms, and were done at the age of
fifteen. That they were thought by himself worth printing in the same
volume with _Comus_, is the most noteworthy thing about them.
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