THEIR AUTHORS AND ORIGIN. 37
preacher, says Thomas Campbell, " he must have founded a Church of his own."
After leaving Cambridge, Milton spent five years with his father, who had gone to live on an estate he had purchased at Horton, near Windsor. This was a delightful and productive period of the poet s life. As a boy he had written some poetical versions of the Psalms. In his twenty-first year he had com posed his " Hymn on the Nativity." He now wrote, in 1634, " Comus," a mask, " Lycidas," an elegy on the death of Sir John King ; and about the same time he produced his " Arcades."
In 1638, he set out on a tour in France and Italy. During this journey he visited Grotius, Galileo, Manso, Tasso s patron, and many others, whose expressions of homage for his genius strengthened within him the inward prompting that he " might perhaps leave something so written to after-times as they should not willingly let die."
On his return he supplemented his scanty resources by the proceeds of a school, in which he instructed his nephews and a few other scholars. This school was carried on at a house in Aldersgate Street, London. At the same time he began to write important prose works, demanded by the political circumstances of the times, for the defence of Puritanism and the exposure of prelatical presumption.
At the age of thirty-four Milton married his first wife, Mary Powell, the daughter of a magistrate in Oxfordshire. But soon after, owing to uncongeniality of disposition, as it is supposed, she withdrew from her new home ; and persisting in her absence, Milton published his views on divorce, and appeared to be about to act on them. This was prevented by the recon ciliation which in a short time took place. This first wife was the mother of Milton s three daughters. She died nine years after the reconciliation.
In the year 1644 Milton published his noble " Speech for the liberty of unlicensed Printing." In this and some other of his prose writings, the writer, leaving the ordinary level, seems o
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