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But these prolusions that we have surviving from the Christ's College days are only one phase of his existence then.

Perhaps his most important private activity was the combination of reading, discussion with a few -- if we can trust his writings to Diodati and the younger Gill, very few -- congenial companions.

Lines 23-36 of Lycidas later point to a friendship with Edward King, who entered Christ's College 9 June 1626.

No other names among the young men in residence at the time seem to have been even suggested by Milton as those of persons with whom he in any way consorted.

But that scarcely means that he was the aloof, forbidding type of student who shared few if any activities with his fellows, the banter of the surviving prolusions providing enough evidence to deny this.

Apparently he was not a participant in the college or university theatricals, which he once attacked as utterly unworthy performances ( see Apology, 3:300 ) ; ;

but even in that famous passage, Milton was aiming not at the theatricals as such but at their performance by ' persons either enter'd, or presently to enter into the ministry.

The fact that he nowhere mentioned theatrical performances as part of the activities of the boys later in his hypothetical academy ( 1644 ) should not be taken too seriously as evidence that he desired them to eschew such performances.

Perhaps, in that short piece or letter written to Hartlib in which he sketched his scheme for educating young men, he merely overlooked that phase of their exercises.