Chapter 42
Week 16, Instructor Calendar, May 1896
O, full of scorpions is my mind!
III.ii
Milton today.
Concordia prepared the classroom in advance of her students’ arrival, spacing apart desks, laying out papers and pencils. The juniors were to be tested on Paradise Lost, part of their Mastery in Classics degree requirement. She had already been visited (haunted might be a better word) by a steady stream of students in her office this week, those seeking to compress half a term’s worth of knowledge in the space of a one-hour tutoring session. A Herculean task at best.
What was it about Milton’s Paradise Lost? Every year, the students fretted over it. Of course, they had eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson as a surprising ally in that regard:
We read Milton for instruction
