“greybeards of rare intellectual powers”

“Every boy entering a university expects it to be a wonderful, exciting world, different from anything he has ever known. If he is studious, eager, and serious-minded, he naturally expects a university to be peopled with boys not unlike himself, and with greybeards of rare intellectual powers and personalities to match. If, in addition, he arrives with the applause of schoolteachers still ringing in his ears, with a hunger for learning still unsatisfied, and with an idealistic determination to fulfil the high hopes of doting parents, he will suffer disappointments and heartaches difficult to endure.
. That John Milton was such a boy there is much to persuade us. Recently turned sixteen, he was admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge, on Saturday, 12 February 1625, almost exactly a month after the Lent term had begun.”

(William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), vol I, p. 23.)