But Aubrey can hardly mean anything more than that Chappell on some occasion struck or beat his pupil, and this interpretation is supported by Milton's verses to Diodati, written in the spring of 1626, in which, while acknowledging that he had been directed to withdraw from Cambridge ("_nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor_") he expresses his intention of speedily returning:-- "Stat quoque juncosas Cami remeare paludes, Atque iterum raucae murmur adire scholae." A short rustication would be just the notice the University would be likely to take of the conduct of a pupil who had been engaged in a scuffle with his tutor, in which the fault was not wholly or chiefly his.

Formal corporal punishment would have rendered rustication unnecessary.

That Milton was not thought wholly in the wrong appears from his not having been mulcted of a term's residence, his absence notwithstanding, and from the still more significant fact that Chappell lost his pupil.

His successor was Nathaniel Tovey, in whom his patroness, the Countess of Bedford, had discerned "excellent talent." What Milton thought of him there is nothing to show.
This temporary interruption of the smoothness of Milton's University life occurred, as has been seen, quite early in its course.

Had it indeed implied a stigma upon him or the University, the blot would in either case have been effaced by the perfect regularity of his subsequent career.