The teaching staff was respectable in character and ability, including many future bishops.

But while the academical credentials of the tutors were unimpeachable, perhaps not one among them all could show a commission from the Spirit.
No one then at Cambridge seems to have been in the least degree capable of arousing enthusiasm.

It might not indeed have been easy for a Newman or a Green to captivate the independent soul of Milton, even at this susceptible period of his life; failing any approach to such external influence, he would be likely to leave Cambridge the same man as he entered it.

Ere, indeed, he had completed a year's residence, his studies were interrupted by a temporary rupture with the University, probably attributable to his having been at first placed under an uncongenial tutor.

William Chappell was an Arminian and a tool of Laud, who afterwards procured him preferment in Ireland, and, as Professor Masson judges from his treatise on homiletics, "a man of dry, meagre nature." His relations with such a pupil could not well be harmonious; 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.