It must have been an unspeakable relief to him to be at length emancipated from compulsory exercises, and to build up his mind without nod or beck from any quarter.

For these blessings he was chiefly indebted to his father, whose industry and prudence had procured his independence and his rural retirement, and whose tender indulgence and noble confidence dispensed him from what most would have deemed the reasonable condition that he should at least earn his own living.

"I will not," he exclaims to his father, "praise thee for thy fulfilment of the ordinary duties of a parent, my debt is heavier (_me poscunt majora_).

Thou hast neither made me a merchant nor a barrister":-- "Neque enim, pater, ire jubebas Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri, Certaque condendi fulget spes aurea nummi: Nec rapis ad leges, male custoditaque gentis Jura, nec insulsis damnas clamoribus aures." The stroke at the subserviency of the lawyers to the Crown (_male custodita jura gentis_) would be appreciated by the elder Milton, nor can we doubt that the old Puritan fully approved his son's resilience from a church denied by Arminianism and prelacy.

He would not so easily understand the dedication of a life to poetry, and the poem from which the above citation is taken seems to have been partly composed to smooth his repugnance away.