Milton was one of those pupils who are more likely to react against
a tutor than to take a ply from him. A preaching divine--Chappell
composed a treatise on the art of preaching--a narrow ecclesiastic of
the type loved by Land, was exactly the man who would drive Milton
into opposition. But the tutor of the seventeenth century was not
able, like the easy-going tutor of the eighteenth, to leave the young
rebel to pursue the reading of his choice in his own chamber. Chappell
endeavoured to drive his pupil along the scholastic highway of
exercises. Milton, returning to Cambridge after his summer vacation,
eager for the acquisition of wisdom, complains that he "was dragged
from his studies, and compelled to employ himself in composing
some frivolous declamation!" Indocile, as he confesses himself
(indocilisque aetas prava magistra fuit), he kicked against either the
discipline or the exercises exacted by college rules. He was punished.
Aubrey had heard that he was flogged, a thing not impossible in
itself, as the _Admonition Book_ of Emanuel gives an instance of
corporal chastisement as late as 1667. Aubrey's statement, however, is
a dubitative interlineation in his MS.
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