[originaltext] When John Milton, writer of Paradise Lost, entered Cambridge

When John Milton, writer of Paradise Lost, entered Cambridge University in 1625, he was already skilled in Latin after seven years of studying it as his second language at St. Paul’s school, London. Like all English boys who prepared for college in grammar school, he had learned not only to read Latin but also to speak and write it fluently and correctly. His pronunciation of Latin was English, however, and seemed to have sounded strange to his friends when he later visited Italy.
    Schoolboys gained their skill in Latin in a bitter way. They memorized rules to make learning by heart easier. They first made a word-for-word translation and then an idiomatic translation into English. As they increased their skill, they translated their English back into Latin without referring to the book and then compared their translation with the original. The schoolmaster was always at hand to encourage them.
    After several years of study, the boys began to write compositions in imitation of the Latin writers they read. And as they began to read Latin poems, they began to write poems in Latin. Because Milton was already a poet at ten, his poems were much better than those painfully put together by other boys. During the seven years Milton spent at the university, he made constant use of his command of Latin. He wrote some excellent Latin poems which he published among his works in 1645.