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Recapitulation of Milton's undergraduate career
Looking back from the spring of 1629 over the four years of Milton's undergraduate days, certain phases of his college career stand out as of permanent consequence to him and hence to us.
Of course the principal factor in the whole experience was the kind of education he received.
It differed from what an undergraduate receives today from any American college or university mainly in the certainty of what he was forced to learn compared with the loose and widely scattered information obtained today by most of our undergraduates.
Milton was required to absorb and display an intensive and accurate knowledge of Latin grammar, logic-rhetoric, ethics, physics or natural philosophy, metaphysics, and Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
He had also sampled various special fields of learning, being unable to miss some study of divinity, Justinian ( law ), and Galen ( medicine ).
Above all, he had learned to write formal Latin prose and verse to a remarkable degree of artistry.
He had learned to dispute devastatingly, both formally and informally in Latin, and according to the rules on any topic, pro or con, drawn from almost any subject, more especially from Aristotle's works.
He could produce carefully constructed orations, set and formal speeches, artfully and prayerfully made by writing and rewriting with all the aid his tutor and others could provide, and then delivered verbatim from memory.
He had also learned to dispute extempore remarkably well, the main evidence for which of course is the presence of his name in the honors list of 1628/29.
He also displayed the ability to write Latin verse on almost any topic of dispute, the verses, of course, to be delivered from memory.
Then we have surviving at least one instance of a poem prepared for another, in Naturam non Pati Senium, and perhaps also the De Idea Platonica.
But his greatest achievement, in his own eyes and in the eyes of his colleagues and teachers, was his amazing ability to produce literary Latin pieces, and he was often called on to do so.
These were his public academic activities, domi forisque, in the college and in the university.
And his performances attracted much attention, as the frequency of his surviving pieces in any calendar that may be set up for his undergraduate activities testifies.

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