Friday, May 18:—At a second, or afternoon sitting (present: Lord President Lawrence, Lord Lambert, General Desborough, the Earl of Mulgrave, Colonel Fiennes, Colonel Jones, Colonel Sydenham, Colonel Montague), "Colonel Fiennes reports from the Committee of the Council to whom the same was referred the draft of a Letter to be sent from his Highness to the King of France concerning the Protestants in the Dukedom of Savoy; which, after some amendments, was approved and ordered to be offered to his Highness as the advice of the Council."

Tuesday, May 22:—Present: Lord President Lawrence, Colonel Sydenham, Mr. Rous, Colonel Montague, Colonel Jones, General Desborough, Mr. Strickland, Colonel Fiennes, Lord Viscount Lisle, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Lord Lambert. "The Latin draft of a Letter to the Duke of Savoy in behalf of the Protestants in his Territory was this day read. Ordered, That it be offered to his Highness as the advice of the Council that his Highness will please to sign the said Letter and cause it to be sent to the said Duke."

Wednesday, May 23:—"Colonel Fiennes reports from the Committee of the Council the draft of two letters in reference to the sufferings of the Protestants in the territories of the Duke of Savoy, the one to the States-General of the United Provinces, the other to the Cantons of the Swisses professing the Protestant Religion; which were read, and, after several amendments, agreed. Ordered, That it be offered to his Highness the Lord Protector as the advice of the Council that he will please to send the said letters in his Highness's name to the said States-General and the Cantons respectively."

Though Milton's name is not mentioned in these minutes, it was he, and no other, that penned, or at least turned into Latin, for the Committee, and so for the Council and the Protector, the particular letters minuted, and indeed all the other documents required by the occasion. The following is a list of them:—

(LIV.) TO THE DUKE OF SAVOY, May 25, 1655:[1]—This Letter may be translated entire. It is superscribed "OLIVER, Protector of the Commonwealth of England, &c., to the Most Serene Prince, EMANUEL, Duke of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, Greeting "; and it is worded as follows:—"Most Serene Prince,—Letters have reached us from Geneva, and also from the Dauphinate and many other places bordering upon your dominion, by which we are informed that the subjects of your Royal Highness professing the Reformed Religion were recently commanded by your edict and authority, within three days after the promulgation of the said edict, to depart from their habitations and properties under pain of death and forfeiture of all their estates, unless they should give security that, abandoning their own religion, they would within twenty days embrace the Roman Catholic one, and that, though they applied as suppliants to your Royal Highness, begging that the edict might be revoked, and that they might be taken into their ancient favour and restored to the liberty granted them by your Most Serene ancestors, yet part of your army attacked them, butchered many most cruelly, threw others into chains, and drove the rest into the deserts and snow-covered mountains, where some hundreds of families are reduced to such extremities that it is to be feared that all will soon perish miserably by cold and hunger. When such news was brought us, we could not possibly, in hearing of so great a calamity to that sorely afflicted people, but be moved with extreme grief and compassion. But, confessing ourselves bound up with them not by common humanity only, but also by community of Religion, and so by an altogether brotherly relationship, we have thought that we should not be discharging sufficiently either our duty to God, or the obligations of brotherly love and the profession of the same religion, if we were merely affected with feelings of grief over this disaster and misery of our brethren, and did not exert ourselves to the very utmost of our strength and ability for their rescue from so many unexpected misfortunes. Wherefore the more we most earnestly beseech and adjure your Royal Highness that you will bethink yourself again of the maxims of your Most Serene ancestors and of the liberty granted and confirmed by them time after time to their Vaudois subjects. In granting and confirming which, as they performed what in itself was doubtless most agreeable to God, who has pleased to reserve the inviolable jurisdiction and power over Conscience for Himself alone, so there is no doubt either that they had a due regard for their subjects, whom they found hardy and faithful in war and obedient always in peace. And, as your Royal Serenity most laudably treads in the footsteps of your forefathers in all their other kindly and glorious actions, so it is our prayer to you again and again not to depart from them in this matter either, but to repeal this edict, and any other measure that may have been passed for the molestation of your subjects of the Reformed Religion, restoring them to their habitations and goods, ratifying the rights and liberty anciently granted them, and ordering their losses to be repaired and an end to be put to their troubles. If your Royal Highness shall do this, you will have done a deed most acceptable to God, you will have raised up and comforted those miserable and distressed sufferers, and you will have highly obliged all your neighbours that profess the Reformed Religion,—ourselves most of all, who shall then regard your kindness and clemency to those poor people as the fruit of our solicitation. Which will moreover tie us to the performance of all good offices in return, and lay the firmest foundations not only for the establishment but even for the increase of the relationship and friendship between this Commonwealth and your Dominion. Nor do we less promise this to ourselves from your justice and moderation. We beg Almighty God to bend your mind and thoughts in this direction, and we heartily pray for you and for your people peace and truth and prosperity in all your affairs."[2]—The bearer of this letter to the Duke, as we know, was Mr. Samuel Morland, who had been selected as the Protector's special Commissioner for the purpose. He left London on the 26th of May. He took with him, also, a copy of the Latin speech which he was to deliver to the Duke in presenting the letter. As there is much probability that this Latin speech is also in part of Milton's composition, and as it is in even a bolder and more indignant strain than the letter, it may be well to translate it too:—"Your Serene and Royal Highnesses [the Duke and his mother both addressed?],—The Most Serene Lord, Oliver, Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, has sent me to your Royal Highnesses; whom he salutes very heartily, and to whom, with a very high affection and peculiar regard for your Serenities, he wishes a long life and reign, and a prosperous issue of all your affairs, amid the applauses and respect of your people. And this is due to you, whether in consideration of the excellent character and royal descent of your Highnesses, and the great expectation of the world from so many eminent good qualities, or in recollection, after reference to records, of the ancient friendship of our Kings with the Royal house of Savoy. Though I am, I confess, but a young man, and not very ripe in experience of affairs, yet it has pleased my Most Serene and Gracious Master to send me, as one much devoted to your Royal Highnesses and ardently attached to all bearing the Italian name, on what is really a great mission.—The ancient legend is that the son of Croesus was completely dumb from his birth. When, however, he saw a soldier aiming a wound at his father, straightway he had the use of his tongue. No other is my predicament, feeling as I do my tongue loosened by those very recent and bloody wounds of Mother Church. A great mission surely that is to be called wherein all the safety and hope of many poor people is comprehended—their sole hope lying in the chance that they shall be able, by all their loyalty, obedience, and most humble prayers, to mollify and appease the minds of your Royal Highnesses, now irritated against them. In behalf of these poor people, whose cause pity itself may seem to make its own, the Most Serene Protector of England also comes as an intercessor, and most earnestly requests and beseeches your Royal Highnesses to deign to extend your mercy to these your very poor and most outcast subjects—those, I mean, who, inhabiting the roots of the Alps and certain valleys in your dominion, have professed nominally the Religion of the Protestants. For he has heard (what no one can say has been done by the will of your Royal Highnesses) that those wretched creatures have been partly killed by your forces, partly expelled by violence and driven from their home and country, so that they are now wandering, with their wives and children, houseless, roofless, poor, and destitute of all resource, through rugged and inhospitable spots and over snow-covered mountains. And, through the days of this transaction, if only the things are true that fame at present reports everywhere (would that Fame were proved a liar!), what was not dared and attempted against them? Houses smoking everywhere, torn limbs, the ground bloody! Ay, and virgins, ravished and hideously abused, breathed their last miserably; and old men and persons labouring under illness were committed to the flames; and some infants were dashed against the rocks, and the brains of others were cooked and eaten. Atrocity horrible and before unheard of, savagery such that, good God, were all the Neros of all times and ages to come to life again, what a shame they would feel at having contrived nothing equally inhuman! Verily, verily, Angels are horrorstruck, men are amazed; heaven itself seems to be astounded by these cries, and the earth itself to blush with the shed blood of so many innocent men. Do not, great God, do not seek the revenge due to this iniquity. May thy blood, Christ, wash away this stain!—But it is not for me to relate these things in order as they happened, or to dwell longer upon them; and what my Most Serene Master requests from your Royal Highnesses you will understand better from his own Letter. Which letter I am ordered to deliver to your Royal Highnesses with all observance and due respect; and, should your Royal Highnesses, as we greatly hope, grant a favourable and speedy answer, you will both do an act most gratifying to the Lord Protector, who has taken this business deeply to heart, and to the whole Commonwealth of England, and also restore, by an exercise of mercy very worthy of your Royal Highnesses, life, safety, spirit, country, and estates to many thousands of most afflicted people who depend on your pleasure; and me you will send back to my native country as the happy messenger of your conspicuous clemency, with great joy and report of your exalted virtues, the deeply obliged servant of your Royal Highnesses for evermore."[3]

[Footnote 1: So dated in the official copy preserved in the Record Office (Hamilton's Milton Papers, p. 15) and in the copy actually delivered to the Duke (Morland, pp. 572-574)—the phrase in both being "Dabantur ex aula nostra Westmonasterii, 25 Maii, anno 1654." In the Skinner Transcript, however, the dating is "Westmonsterio, May 10, 1655;" which again is changed into "Alba Aula, May 1655," i.e. "Whitehall, May 1655" (month only given) in the Printed Collections and in Phillips.]

[Footnote 2: There are one or two slight verbal differences between Milton's original draft, here translated, and the official copy as actually delivered to the Duke, and as printed by Morland. Thus, in the first sentence, instead of "Redditae sunt nobis e Geneva, necnon ex Delphinatu aliisque multis ex locis ditioni vestrae finitimis, literae," the official copy has simply "Redditae sunt nobis multis ex locis ditioni vestae finitimis literae."]

[Footnote 3: I have translated the speech from the official Latin draft, as preserved in the Record Office, and as printed by Mr. Hamilton, Milton Papers, pp. 18-20. Mr. Hamilton has no doubt that the composition is Milton's. He founds his opinion partly on the style, and partly on the fact that the draft is "written in the same hand as the other official copies of Milton's letters." I agree with Mr. Hamilton, though the matter does not seem to be absolutely beyond controversy. The style is generally like Milton's; there are phrases repeated from Milton's Latin elsewhere—e.g. "montesque nivibus coopertos," repeated from the Letter to the Duke of Savoy, and "totius nominis Italici studiosissimum" which almost repeats the "toiius Graeci nominis ... cultor" of the second Letter to Philaras; and there are also phrases identical with some used in Milton's other letters on the subject of the Massacre which have yet to be noted in this list. On the other hand, there are passages and expressions in the Speech that strike one as hardly Miltonic, while the purport in some places would favour the idea that Morland wrote the speech himself. What seems to negative this idea most strongly, and therefore to point most distinctly to Milton as the author, is the existence of the MS. official copy in the Record Office. The speech, that copy proves, must have been prepared before Morland left London, and must have been taken with him. For that it cannot have been merely deposited in the State Paper Office afterwards, as a record of what he did say at Turin, is proved by the fact that his actual speech at Turin, as printed by himself in his book, with an English Translation (pp. 558-561), though in substance identical with the draft-copy, differs in some particulars. In the actual speech the plural, "Your Royal Highnesses," is changed into the singular, "Your Royal Highness," for address to the Duke only, though the Duchess-mother was present; the parenthetical comparison of Morland to the Son of Croesus is entirely omitted; and there are other verbal changes, apparently suggested by Morland's closer information as he approached Turin, or by his sense of fitness at the moment—in illustration of which the reader may compare the very strong passage about "the Neros of all times and ages" as we have just rendered it from the draft with the same passage as we have previously rendered it from Morland's actual speech (ante p. 42). But, if Morland took the speech with him, unless he wrote it himself and had it approved before his departure, who so likely to have furnished it as Milton? All in all, that is the most probable conclusion; and anything un-Miltonic in the speech may be accounted for by supposing that, though the Latin was Milton's, the substance was not entirely his. Morland, though he does not say in his book that the speech was furnished him, does not positively claim it as his own. He, at all events, used the liberty of deviating from the original draft.]

(LV.) TO THE EVANGELICAL SWISS CANTONS, May 25, 1655[1]:—His Highness in this letter recapitulates the facts at some length, and expresses his conviction that the Cantons, so much nearer the scene of the horrors, are already duly roused. He informs them that he has written to the Duke of Savoy and hopes the intercession may have effect; but adds, "If, however, he should determine otherwise, we are prepared to exchange counsels with you on the subject of the means by which we may be able most effectively to relieve, re-establish, and save from certain and undeserved ruin, an innocent people oppressed and tormented by so many injuries, they being also our dearest brothers in Christ."[2]

[Footnote 1: So dated in the official copy as dispatched, and as printed in Morland's book, pp. 581-562; but draft dated "Westmonasterio, May 19, 1655" in the Skinner Transcript, the Printed Collection, and Phillips.]

[Footnote 2: One of the phrases in this letter about the poor Piedmontese Protestants is "nunc sine tare, sine teoto, ... per monies desertos atque nives, cum conjugibus ac liberis, miserrime vagantur." The phrase occurs almost verbatim in Morland's speech to the Duke of Savoy—"sine lare, sine tecto ... cum suis conjugibus ac liberis vagari."]

(LVI.) TO CHARLES GUSTAVUS, KING OF SWEDEN, May 25, 1655:—To the same effect as the last, mutatis mutandis. What sovereign can be more ready to stir in such a cause than his Swedish majesty, the successor of those who have been champions of the Protestantism of Europe? Gladly will the Protector form a league with him and with other powers to do whatever may be necessary.

(LVII.) TO THE KING OF DENMARK, May 25, 1655:[1]—An appeal in the same strain to his Danish Majesty: phraseology varied a little, But matter the same.

[Footnote 1: This and the last both so dated in official copy as printed in Morland's book, pp. 554-557; dated only "May 1655" in Skinner Transcript, Printed Collection, and Phillips.]

(LVIII.) TO LOUIS XIV., KING OF FRANCE, May 25, 1655:[1]—The story recapitulated for the benefit of his French Majesty, with the addition that it is reported that some troops of his Majesty had assisted the Piedmontese soldiery in the attack on the Vaudois. This the Protector can hardly believe: it would be so much against that policy of Toleration which the Kings of France have found essential for the peace of their own dominions. The Protector cannot doubt, at all events, that his Majesty will use his powerful influence with the Duke of Savoy to induce him at once, as far as may be possible, to repair the outrageous wrong already done.

[Footnote 1: This Letter is omitted in the Printed Collection and in Phillips; but it is given in the Skinner Transcript (No. 38 there), and Mr. Hamilton has printed it in his Milton Papers (p. 2). It had already been printed in Morland's book (pp. 564-565).]

(LIX.) TO THE MOST EMINENT LORD, CARDINAL MAZARIN, May 25, 1625:[1]—Not content with writing to Louis XIV., Cromwell addressed also the great French Minister. After mentioning the dreadful occasion, the letter proceeds—"There is clearly nothing which has obtained for the French nation greater esteem with all their neighbours professing the Reformed Religion than the liberty and privileges permitted and granted to Protestants by edicts and public acts. It is for this reason chiefly, though for others as well, that this Commonwealth has sought for the friendship and alliance of the French to a greater degree than before. For the settlement of this there have now for a good while been dealings here with the King's Ambassador, and his Treaty is now almost brought to a conclusion. Moreover, the singular benignity and moderation of your Eminence, always manifest hitherto in the most important transactions of the Kingdom relating to the French Protestants, causes me to hope much from your own prudence and magnanimity."

[Footnote 1: Utterly undated in Printed Collection and in Phillips, and quite misplaced in both; properly dated "May 25, 1655" in Skinner Transcript.]

(LX.) TO THE STATES-GENERAL OF THE UNITED PROVINCES, May 25, 1655:[1]—To the same effect as the letters to the Swiss Cantons and the Kings of Sweden and Denmark, but with emphatic expression of his Highness's peculiar confidence In the Dutch Republic in such a crisis. He offers in the close to act in concert with the States-General and other Protestant powers for any interference that may be necessary.

[Footnote 1: So dated in official copy, as printed in Morland's book, pp. 558-560; but undated in Printed Collection and in Phillips, and dated "West., Junii—1655" in Skinner Transcript (No. 41 there). This last is a mistake; for Thurloe speaks of the letter as already written May 25 (Thurloe to Pell, Vaughan's Protectorate, I. 185). The official copy, as given in Morland, differs somewhat from Milton's draft. "Ego" for Cromwell, in one sentence, is changed into "Nos;" and the closing words of the draft, "et is demum, sentiet orthodoxnon injurias atque miserias tam graves non posse nos negligere" are omitted in the official copy, possibly as too strong. These may be among the amendments made in Council, May 23.]

(LXI.) TO THE PRINCE OF TRANSYLVANIA, May, 1655:[1]—Transylvania, now included in the Austrian Empire, was then an independent Principality of Eastern Europe, in precarious and variable relations with Austria, Poland, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. The population, a mixture of Wallachs, Magyars. Germans, and Slavs, was largely Protestant; and the present Prince, George Ragotzki, was an energetic supporter of the Protestant interest in that part of Europe, and a man generally of much political and military activity. He had written, it appears, to Cromwell on the 16th of November, 1654, and had sent an Envoy to England with the letter. It had expressed his earnest desire for friendship and alliance with the Protector, and for co-operation with him in the defence of the Reformed Religion. Cromwell now acknowledges the letter and embassy, with high compliments to the Prince personally, of whose merits and labours there had been so much fame. This leads him at once to the Piedmontese business. Is not that an opportunity for the co-operation his Serenity had mentioned? At any rate, it behoves all Protestant princes to be on the alert; for who knows how far the Duke of Savoy's example may spread?

[Footnote 1: Dated so in Skinner Transcript, Printed Collection, and Phillips—with the addition "Westminster" in the first, and "Whitehall" in the two last: no copy given in Morland's book.]

(LXII.) TO THE CITY OF GENEVA, June 8, 1655:—This letter announces the collection in progress in England for the relief of the Piedmontese Protestants. It will take some time to complete the collection; but meanwhile the first instalment of L2000 [Cromwell's personal contribution] is remitted for immediate use. His Highness is quite sure that the City authorities of Geneva will cheerfully take charge of the money, and see it distributed among those most in need. A postscript bids the Genevese expect L1500 of the sum through Gerard Hensch of Paris, and the remaining L500 through Mr. Stoupe, a well known travelling agent of Cromwell and Thurloe.

(LXIII.) TO THE KING OF FRANCE, July 29, 1655:—The Protector here acknowledges an answer received to his previous letter of May 25. [The answer had been delivered to Morland early in June, when he was on his way through Paris, and transmitted by him to the Protector. A translation of it is given in Morland's book, pp. 566-567.] He is glad to be confirmed in his belief that the French officers who lent their troops to assist the Piedmontese soldiery in that bloody business did so without his Majesty's order and against his will—glad also to learn that these officers have been rebuked, and that his Majesty has, of his own accord, remonstrated with the Duke of Savoy, and advised him to stop his persecution of the Vaudois. As no effect has yet been produced however, [Morland has by this time delivered his speech at Turin, and reported the dubious answer given by the Duke of Savoy: ante pp. 42-43], the Protector is now despatching a special envoy [i.e. Mr. George Downing] to Turin, to make farther remonstrances. This envoy will pass through Paris, and his mission will have the greater chance of success if his Majesty will take the opportunity of again impressing his views upon the Duke. By so doing, by punishing those French officers who employed his Majesty's troops so disgracefully, and by sheltering such of the poor Vaudois as may have sought refuge in France, his Majesty will earn the respect of other Powers, and will strengthen the loyalty of his own Protestant subjects.

(LXIV.) To CARDINAL MAZARIN, July 29, 1655:—This is a special note, accompanying the foregoing letter, and introducing and recommending Mr. Downing to his Eminence.

Besides these official documents for Cromwell on the Piedmontese business, there came from Milton his memorable Sonnet on the same, expressing his own feelings, and Cromwell's too, with less restraint. It may have been in private circulation at the Protector's Court at the date of the last two of the ten letters:

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold; Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old, When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones, Forget not: in thy book record their groans Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe.[1]

[Footnote 1: If Morland's speech at Turin was of Milton's composition, as we have found probable, the contrast between one phrase in that speech and the opening of this Sonnet is curious. "Do not, great God, do not seek the revenge due to this iniquity," says the Speech; "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints," says the Sonnet.]

From the Piedmontese Massacre we have now to revert to Morus. His Fides Publica, in reply to Milton's Defensio Secunda, had been published in an incomplete state, as we have seen, by Ulac at the Hague in August or September 1654; and Milton had a rejoinder to this publication ready or nearly ready, as we have also seen, by the end of March 1655. The reason why this Rejoinder had not already appeared has now to be stated.

One of Morus's reasons for hurrying into France so unexpectedly, and leaving his unfinished book in Ulac's hands, seems to have been the chance of a professorship or pastorship there that would enable him to quit Holland permanently, and settle at length in his own country. "Some speak of calling Morus, against whom Mr. Milton writes so sharply, to be Professor of Divinity at Nismes; but most men say it will ruin that church," is a piece of Parisian news sent by Pell to Thurloe in a letter from Zurich dated Oct. 28, 1654;[1] and, with that prospect, or some other, Morus seems to have remained in France for some time after that date. When copies of his incomplete Fides Publica reached him there, he may not have thanked Ulac for issuing the book in such a state without leave given. All the more, however, he must have felt himself obliged to complete the book. Accordingly he did, from France, forward the rest of the MS. to Ulac, with the result of the appearance at last from Ulac's press of a supplementary volume with this title: "Alexandri Mori, Ecclesiastae et Sacrarum Litterum Professoris, Supplementum Fidei Publicae contra calumnias Joannis Miltoni. Hagae-Comitum, Typis Adriani Ulacq, 1655." ("Supplement to the Public Testimony of Alexander Morus, Churchman and Professor of Sacred Literature, in reply to the Calumnies of John Milton. Hague: Printed by Adrian Ulac, 1655.") Ulac prefixes, under the heading "The Printer to the Reader," a brief explanatory Preface. "You have here, good Reader," he says, "the missing remainder of the edition of a Treatise which we lately printed and published under the title Aleaxandri Mori Fides Publica contra calumnias Joannis Miltoni. This remainder that Reverend gentleman has sent me from France. Of the whole matter judge as may seem fair and just to you. Let it suffice for me to have satisfied your curiosity. Farewell." It must have been this Supplementum of Morus, reaching London perhaps in April 1655, or perhaps during the first busy correspondence about the Piedmontese massacre, that delayed the appearance of Milton's already written Rejoinder to the imperfect Fides Publica. He would notice this "Supplement" as well as the volume already published, and so have done with Morus altogether.

[Footnote 1: Vaughan's Protectorate, I. 73; where "Mr. Miton" appears as "Mr. Hulton."]

Morus's Supplementum consists of 105 pages, added to the original Fides Publica, but numbered onwards from the last page there, so as to admit of the binding of the two volumes into one volume consecutively paged, though with two title-pages, differently dated. The matter also proceeds continuously from the point at which the Fides Publica, broke off. Referring to the testimony borne to his character in the venerable Diodati's Letter from Geneva to Salmasius, dated May 9, 1648, and connecting it with Milton's mention of his personal acquaintance with Diodati formed in his visit to Geneva in 1639, Morus addresses Milton thus:

"This is that John Diodati upon whom you cast no small stain by your praise, and who truly, if he were alive, would prefer to be in the number of those who are vituperated by you. Would he were alive! How he would beat back your pride, not indeed with other pride, but with the gravest smile of contempt! How he would despise in his great mind your thoughts, sayings, acts, all in one! How he would anticipate your fine satire, and, moved with holy loathing, spit upon it! 'With him,' you say, 'I had daily society at Geneva.' But what did you learn from him? What of desirable contagion did you carry away from his acquaintance? Often have we heard him enumerating those friends he had in your country whom he commended on the score of either learning or goodness. Of you we never heard a syllable from him."

Then, after telling of his affectionate parting with Diodati at Geneva, when both, were in tears and the old man blessed him, he proceeds to quote other Testimonials, either in French or in Latin. Four more are still from former Swiss friends:—viz. an extract from another letter of Diodati, addressed to M. L'Empereur; a letter from M. Sartoris to Salmasius, dated Geneva, April 5, 1648; a testimonial from the lawyer Gothofridius, dated Geneva, May 24, 1648; and a subsequent letter from the same, dated Basel, April 23, 1651. All are very complimentary. Passing then to his life in Holland after leaving Switzerland, Morus continues the series of his testimonials. We have first, in French or Latin, or both, a letter from the Church at Middleburg to the Church at Geneva, dated Nov. 2, 1649, an extract from a letter of the Synod of the Walloon Churches of the United Provinces to the Pastors and Professors of Geneva, dated May 6, 1650, and a testimonial from the Church of Middleburg, on the occasion of sending M. Morus as deputy to the said Synod, dated April 19, 1650. More documents of the same kind follow, chiefly for the purpose of disproving the assertion that M. Morus had been condemned and ejected by the Middleburg Church. They include an extract from the Acts of the Consistory of the Walloon Church of Middleburg, dated July 10, 1652, a testimonial from the Middleburg Church of the same date, and an extract from the Articles of the Synod of the Walloon Churches held at Groede, Aug. 21-23, 1652. Having thus brought himself, with ample testimonials of character, to the date of his removal from the Middleburg Church to the Professorship in Amsterdam, he takes up more expressly the Accusatio de Bontid or Bontia scandal. He gives what he calls the true and exact version of that story, with those details about Madame de Saumaise and her quarrel with him on Bontia's account which have already appeared in our narrative. He lays stress on the fact that it was himself that had instituted the law-process, and persevered in it to the end; and he dwells at some length on the successful issue of the case both in the Walloon Synod and in the Supreme Court of Holland. He has evidence, he says, that Salmasius, to his dying day, spoke in high terms of him, and admitted that Madame de Saumaise was in the wrong. "This statement has been made," he says, "not solely in reply to your insolence, but also out of regard for the weakness and ignorance of those at a distance who have imbibed the venom of the calumny and heard of the spiteful revenge to which I was subject, but not of the unusual sequel of its judicial discomfiture. All of whom, but especially my friends and countrymen, amid whom there has happened to me the same that happened to Basil among his neighbours, I request and beseech by all that is sacred not rashly to credit mere report, much less the letters which my adversaries have sent hither and thither through all nations, especially after they perceived that they were driven from all their defences at home, judging that they would more easily invest their lie with belief and authority in distant parts. Fair critics, I doubt not, will at least suspend their judgment, and not incline to either side, until there shall have reached them a just narrative of the facts, truly and freely written by a friend, the publication of which has hitherto been kept back at my desire." Three additional testimonials are then appended to show that his reputation had not suffered in Amsterdam on account of the Saumaise-Bontia scandal, and especially that the rumour that he had been suspended from ministerial functions there was utterly untrue. These Amsterdam testimonials, as being the latest in date, and the most important in Morus's favour, may be given in abstract:—

From the Magistrates of Amsterdam, July 11, 1654:—"Whereas the Reverend and very learned Mr. Alexander Morus, Professor of Sacred History in our illustrious School, has complained to us that one John Milton, in a lately published book, has attacked his reputation with atrocious calumnies, and has added moreover that the Magistrates of Amsterdam have interdicted him the pulpit, and that only his Professorship of Greek remains,... We, &c., testify." What they testify is that, since Morus had come to Amsterdam, "not only had he done nothing which could afford ground for such calumnies, or was unworthy of a Christian and Theologian," but he had also discharged the duties of his Professorship with extraordinary learning, eloquence and acceptance. So far, therefore, were the Magistrates from censuring M. Morus that, on the contrary, they were ready still, on any occasion, to afford him all the protection and show him all the good will in their power. The certificate is sealed with the City seal, and signed by "N. Nicolai," the City clerk.

From the Amsterdam Church (about same date):—Three Pastors of this Church—Gothofrid Hotton, Henry Blanche-Tete, and Nicolas de la Bassecour—certify, "in the name of the whole convocation of the Gallo-Belgie Church of Amsterdam," that Morus discharges his Professorship with high credit; also "that, as regards his life and conversation, they are so far from knowing or acknowledging him to be guilty of those things of which he is accused by one Milton, an Englishman, in his lately published book, that, on the contrary, they have frequently requested sermons from him, and he has delivered such in the church, excellent in quality and perfectly orthodox,—which could not have occurred if anything of the alleged kind had been known to his brethren (quod heud factum fuisset si hujusmodi quioquam nobis innotuisset)."

From the Curators of the Amsterdam School, July 29, 1654:—To the same effect, with the story of the circumstances of the appointment of Morus to the Professorship. They had been very anxious to get him, and he had justified their choice. "We think the calumnies with which he is undeservedly loaded arise from nothing else than the ill-will which is the inseparable accompaniment of especially distinguished virtue." Signed, for the Curators, by "C. de Graef" and "Simon van Hoorne."

After asking Milton how he can face these flat contradictions of his charges, not from mere individuals, but from important public bodies, and saying that "one favourable nod from any one of the persons concerned would be worth more than the vociferations of a thousand Miltons to all eternity," Morus corrects Milton's mistake as to the nature of his Professorship. It is not a Professorship of Greek, but of Sacred History, involving Greek only in so far as one might refer in one's lectures to Josephus or the Greek Fathers. But he had been a Professor of Greek—in Geneva, to wit, when little over twenty years of age. Nor, in spite of all Milton's facetiousness on the subject of Greek, and his puns on Morus in Greek, was he ashamed of the fact. "For all learning whatever is Greek, so that whoever despises Greek Literature, or professors of the same, must necessarily be a sciolist." And here he detects the reason of Milton's incessant onslaughts on Salmasius. Milton was evidently most ambitious of the fame of scholarship, as appeared from his anticipations of immortality in his Latin poems; and, though he might be a fair Latinist—not immaculate in Latin either, as he might hear some time or other from Salmasius himself, though that was a secret yet—he knew that he could never snatch away from Salmasius the palm of the highest, i.e. of Greek, scholarship. Morus does not claim for himself the title of a perfect classic; he is content with his present position and its duties. Admirable lessons in life are to be obtained from the study of Church History. Of these not the least is the verification of the words in the Gospel, "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you." What calumnies had been borne by Jerome, Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Athanasius, and others of the best of men! With such examples before one, why should an insignificant person, like the writer, conscious too of many faults and weaknesses, take calumny too much to heart? This pathetic strain, attained towards the close of the book, is maintained most skilfully in the peroration.

"But, if credit enough is not given to my own solemn affirmation, nor to this Public Testimony, Thee, Lord God, I make finally my witness, who explorest the inmost recesses of the spirit, who triest the reins, and knowest the secret motives of the breast, a Searcher of hearts to whom, as if by thorough dissection, all things are bare. Thee, God, Thee I call as my witness, who shalt one day be my Judge and the Judge of all, whether it is not the case that men see in this heart of mine what Thou seest not. Would that Thou didst not also see in the same heart what they do not see! But ah me! I am far baser in reality than they feign. Suppliantly I adore the will of Thy Providence that permits me to be falsely accused among men on account of so many hidden faults of which I am truly guilty in Thy sight. Thou, Lord, saidst to Shimei, 'Curse David.' Glory be to Thy name that hast chosen to preserve me, exercised with so many griefs, that I may serve Thyself. There is one great sin discernible in my soul, which I confess before the whole world. I have never served Thee in proportion to my strength; that little talent of Thy grace which Thou hast deigned to grant me I have not yet turned to full account—whether because I have followed too much the pleasures of mere study, or whether I have consumed too much time and labour in refuting the invectives of the evil-disposed, to whom, such has been Thy pleasure, I have been constantly an object of attack. Cover the past for me, regulate the future. Cleared before men, before Thee I shall be cleared never, unless Thy mercy shall be my succour. I confess I have sinned against Thee, nor shall I do so more. Thou seest how this paper on which I write is now all wet with my tears: pardon me, Redeemer mine, and grant that the vow I now take to Thee I may sacredly perform. Let a thousand dogs bark at me, a thousand bulls of Bashan rush upon me, as many lions war against my soul, and threaten me with destruction, I will reply no more, defended enough if only I feel Thee propitious. I will no more waste the time due to Thee, sacred to Thee, in mere trifles, or lose it in beating off the importunity of moths. Whatever extent of life it shall please Thee to appoint me still, I vow, I dedicate, all to Thee, all to Thy Church. So shall we be revenged on our enemies. Convert us all, Thou who only canst. Forgive us, forgive them also; nor to us, nor to them, but to Thy name, be the glory!"

Milton read this, but was not moved. On the 8th of August, 1655, there was published his Rejoinder to the original Fides Publica, with his notice of the Supplementum appended. It is a small volume of 204 pages, entitled Joannis Miltoni, Angli, Pro Se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum, Ecclesiasten, Libelli famosi, cui titulus 'Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Caelum adversus Parricidas Anglicanus', authorem recte dictum. Londini, Typis Newcomianis, 1655 ("The English, John Milton's Defence for Himself, in reply to Alexander Morus, Churchman, rightly called the author of the notorious book entitled 'Cry of the King's Blood to Heaven against the English Parricides,' London, from Newcome's Press, 1655"). This is perhaps the least known now of all Milton's writings. It has never been translated, even in the wretched fashion in which his Defensio Prima and Defensio Secunda have been; and it is omitted altogether in some professed editions of Milton's whole works.[1]

[Footnote 1: The date of publication is from the Thomason copy in the British Museum.]

After a brief Introduction, in which Milton remarks that the quarrel, which was originally for Liberty and the English People, has now dwindled into a poor personal one, he discusses afresh, as the first real point in dispute, the question of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor. Morus's denials, or seeming denials, go for nothing. Any man may deny anything; there are various ways of denial; and he still maintains that Morus is, to all legal intents and purposes, responsible for the book. "Unless I show this." he says, "unless I make it plain either that you are the author of that most notorious book against us, or that you have given sufficient occasion for justly regarding you as the author, I do not object to the conclusion that I have been beaten by you in this controversy, and come out of it ignominiously, with disgrace and shame." How is this strong statement supported? In the first place, there is reproduced the evidence of original, universal, and persistent rumour. "This I say religiously, that through two whole years I met no one, whether a countryman of my own or a foreigner, with whom there could be talk about that book, but they all agreed unanimously that you were called its author, and they named no one for the author but you." To Morus's assertion that he had openly, loudly, and energetically disowned the book, where suspected of the authorship, Milton returns a complex answer. Partly he does not believe the assertion, on the ground that there were many who had heard Morus confessing to the book and boasting of it. Partly he asks why such energetic repudiations were necessary, and why, in spite of them, intimate friends of Morus retained their former opinion. Partly he admits that there may latterly have been such repudiations, but not till there was danger in being thought the author. Any criminal will deny his crime in sight of the axe; and, apart from the punishment which Morus had reason to expect when he knew that Milton's reply to the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was forthcoming, what had not the author of that book to dread after the Peace between the Dutch and the Commonwealth had been concluded? By articles IX., X., and XI. of the Peace it was provided that no public enemy of the Commonwealth should have residence, shelter, living, or commerce, within the bounds of the United Provinces; and who more a public enemy of the Commonwealth than the author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor? No wonder that, after that Peace, Morus had trembled for the consequences of his handiwork. The loss of his Amsterdam Professorship, instant ejection from Holland, and prohibition of return under pain of death, were what he had to fear. Were not these powerful enough motives for denial to a man like Morus? Had not Milton, when he learnt by letters from Durie in May 1654 that Morus was disowning—the book, been entitled to remember these motives? For what other evidence had been produced besides Morus's own word? His friend Hotton's only; and that was no independent testimony, but only Morus's at second hand. And even now, after Morus's repeated and studiously-worded denials in his Fides Publica, how did the case stand?

"That book [the Regii Sanguinis Clamor] consists of various prooemia and epilogues [i.e. addition to the central text]—to wit, An Epistle to Charles, another To the Reader, and two sets of verses at the close, one eulogistic of Salmasius, the other in defamation of me. Now, if I find that you wrote or contributed any page of this whole book, even a single verse, or that you published it, or procured it, or advised it, or superintended the publishing, or even lent the smallest particle of aid therein, you alone, since no one else is to the fore, shall be to me responsible for the whole, the author, the 'Crier'. Nor can you call this merely my severity or vehemence; for this is the procedure established among almost all nations by right and laws of equity. I will adduce, as universally accepted, the Imperial Civil Law. Read Institut. Justiniani l. IV. De Injuriis, Tit. 4: 'If any one shall write, compose, or publish, or with evil design cause the writing, composing, or publishing, of a book or poem (or story) for the defamation of any one,' &c. Other laws add 'Even should he publish in the name of another, or without name;' and all decree that the person is to be taken for the author and punished as such. I ask you now, not whether you wrote the text of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, but whether you made, wrote, published, or caused to be published, the Epistle Dedicatory to Charles prefixed to the Clamor, or any particle thereof; I ask whether you composed or caused to be published the other Epistle to the Reader, or finally that Defamatory Poem, You have replied nothing yet to these precise questions. By merely disowning the Clamor itself and strenuously swearing that you wrote no portion of it, you thought to escape with safe credit, and make game of us, inasmuch as the Epistle to Charles the Son, or that to the Reader, or the set of Iambic verses, is not the Regii Sanguinis Clamor. Take now this in brief, therefore, that you may not be able so to wheel about or prevaricate in future, or hope for any escape or concealment, and that all may know how far from mendacious, how veritable on the contrary, or at least not unfounded, was that report which arose about you: take, I say, this in brief,—that I have ascertained, not by report alone, but by testimony than which none can be surer, that you managed the bringing out of the whole book entitled Regii Sanguinis Clamor, and corrected the printer's proofs, and composed, either alone, or in association with one or two others, the Epistle to Charles II. which bears Ulac's name. Of this your own name 'ALEXANDER MORUS,' subscribed to some copies of that Epistle, has been too clear and ocular proof to many witnesses of the fact for you to be able to deny the charge or to get rid of it.... There are several who have heard yourself either admit, on interrogation, that that Epistle is yours, or declare the fact spontaneously.... If you ask on what evidence I, at such a distance, make these statements, and how they can have become so certain to myself, I reply that it is not on the evidence of rumour merely, but partly on that of most scrupulous witnesses who have most solemnly made the assertions to myself personally, partly on that of letters written either to myself or to others. I will quote the very words of the letters, but will not give the names of the writers, considering that unnecessary in matters of such notoriety independently. Here you have first an extract from a letter to me from the Hague, the writer of which is a man of probity and had no common means of investigating this affair:—'I have ascertained beyond doubt (exploratissimum mihi est) that Morus himself offered the copy of the Clamor Regii Sanguinis to some other printers before Ulac received it, that he superintended the correction of the errors of the press, and that, as soon as the book was finished, copies were given and distributed by him to not a few.'... Take again the following, which a highly honourable and intelligent man in Amsterdam writes as certainly known to himself and as abundantly witnessed there:—'It is most certain that almost all through these parts have regarded Morus as the author of the book called Regii Sanguinis Clamor; for he corrected the sheets as they came from the press, and some copies bore the name of Morus subscribed to the Dedicatory Epistle, of which also he was the author. He himself told a certain friend of mine that he was the author of that Epistle: nay there is nothing more certain than that Morus either assumed or acknowledged the authorship of the same.' ... I add yet a third extract. It is from another letter from the Hague:—'A man of the first rank in the Hague has told me that he has in his possession a copy of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor with Morus's own letter.'"

Farther on Milton re-adverts to the same topic, in a passage which it is also well to quote:

"You say you 'will produce not rumours merely, not conversations merely, but letters, in proof that I had been warned not to assail an innocent man.' Let us then inspect the letter you publish, which was written to you by 'that highly distinguished man, Lord Nieuport, ambassador of the Dutch Confederation,'—a letter, it is evident, which you bring forward to be read, not for any force of proof in it, for it has none, but merely in ostentation. He—and it shows the singular kindliness of 'the highly distinguished man' (for what but goodness in him should make him take so much trouble on your most unworthy account?)—goes to Mr. Secretary Thurloe. He communicates your letter to Mr. Secretary. When he saw that he had no success, he sends to me two honourable persons, friends of mine, with that same letter of yours. What do they do? They read me that letter of Morus, and they request, and say that Ambassador Nieuport also requests, that I will trust to your letter in which you deny being the author of the Clamor Regii Sanguinis. I answered that what they asked was not fair—that neither was Morus's word worth so much, nor was it customary to believe, in contradiction to common report and other ascertained evidence, the mere letter of an accused person and an adversary denying what was alleged against him. They, having nothing more to say on the other side, give up the debate.... When afterwards the Ambassador wanted to persuade Mr. Secretary Thurloe, he had still no argument to produce but the same copy of your letter; whence it is quite clear that those 'reasons' brought to me 'for which he desired' me to be so good as not to publish my book had nothing to do with reasons of State. Do not then corrupt the Ambassador's letter. Nothing there of 'hostile spirit,' nothing of the 'inopportune time;' all he writes is that he 'is sorry I had chosen, notwithstanding his request, to show so little moderation'—sorry, that is, that I had not chosen, at his private request, to oblige you, a public adversary, and to recall and completely rewrite a work already printed and all but out. Let 'the highly distinguished man,' especially as an Ambassador, hold me excused if I would not, and really could not, condone public injuries on private intercessions."

Before Milton passes to the review of Morus's vindication of his character and past career, he disposes of Dr. Crantzius and Ulac, as objects intervening between him and that main task. For the Fides Publica, it will be remembered, had been bound up with that Hague edition of Milton's Defensio Secunda to which the Rev. Dr. Crantzius had prefixed a preface in rebuke of Milton and in defence of Morus, and to which Ulac had also prefixed a statement replying to Milton's charges against him of dishonesty and bankruptcy. Several pages are given to Dr. Crantzius, who is called "a certain I know not what sort of a bed-ridden little Doctor," then taxed with ignorance, garrulity, and general imbecility, and at last kicked out of the way with the phrase "But I do marvellously delight in Doctors." Ulac, as having been reckoned with before, receives briefer notice. "You are a swindler, Ulac, said I; I am a good Arithmetician, says Ulac:" so the notice begins; and then follow some sentences to the effect that Ulac's creditors had been very ill satisfied with his counting, that the rule of probity is not the Logarithmic canon, that correct accounts are different things from Tables of Sines or Tables of Tangents and Secants, and that acting on the square is not necessarily taught by Trigonometry. After which Milton reverts to Ulac's double-dealings with himself, first in his fathering the abusive Dedication of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor while he was corresponding with Milton's friends in London and making kind inquiries about Milton's health, and next in bringing out a pirated edition of the Defensio Secunda, printing the same inaccurately, and actually binding it up with the Fides Publica of Morus, so as to compel a united sale of the two books for his own profit. How a man could have published so coolly a book in which he was himself held up as a rogue and swindler passes Milton's comprehension; but Ulac, he seems to admit, was no ordinary tradesman.

For poor Morus himself there is not an atom of mercy yet. All his dexterous pleading, all his declarations of innocence, all his pathetic appeals, all his citations of the decisions in his favour in the Bontia case by the Walloon Synod and the Supreme Court of Holland, are simply trampled under foot, and the charges formerly made against him are ruthlessly reiterated as true nevertheless. There are even additional details, and fresh charges of the same kind, derived from more recent information. The plan adopted by Milton is to go over the Fides Publica, extracting phrases and sentences from it, and commenting on each extract; but the general effect of the book is that of the ruthless chasing round and round of the poor ecclesiastic in a biographical ellipse, the two foci of which are Geneva and Leyden.

Distinct evidence is produced that both at Geneva and in Holland the fama against Morus was still as strong as ever. The evidence takes the form of extracts from two letters received by Milton since the Fides Publica had appeared;—

From a Letter from Geneva, dated Oct. 14, 1654 (i.e. from that letter of Ezekiel Spanheim of which Milton had told Spanheim that he meant to avail himself, though without mentioning the writer's name: sec ante pp. 172-173). "Our people here cannot sufficiently express their wonder that you are so thoroughly acquainted with the private history of a man unknown to you personally, and that you have painted him so in his native colours that not even by those with whom he has been on the most familiar terms could the whole play-acting career of the man (tota, hominis histrionia) have been more accurately or happily set forth; whence they are at a loss, and I with them, to understand with what face, shameless though he is and impudent-mouthed, he is on the point of daring again to appear in the public theatre. For it is the consummation and completeness of your success in this part of the business that you have not brought forward either imagined or otherwise unknown charges against the man, but charges of common repetition in the mouths of all his greatest friends even, and which can be clearly corroborated by the authority and vote of the whole assembly, and even by the accession of farther criminations to the same effect... I would assure you that hardly any one can now longer be found here, where for many years he discharged a public-office, but greatly to the disgrace of this Church, who would dare or undertake longer to lend his countenance to the man's prostituted character."

From a Letter from Durie at Basel, Oct. 3, 1654:—"As regards Morus's vices and profligacy, Hotton does not seem to entertain that opinion of him; I know, however, that others speak very ill of him, that his hands are against nearly everybody and everybody's hands against him, and that many ministers even of the Walloon Synod are doing their best to have him deprived of the pastoral office. Nor here in Basel do I find men's opinion of him different from that in Holland of those who like him least."

The fresh, particulars of information that Milton had received about Morus and his alleged misdeeds are unsparingly brought out. The name of the woman of bad character at Geneva with whom Morus was said to have been implicated there, and the scandal about whom had driven him from Geneva, has now been ascertained by Milton. It was Claudia Pelletta; and of her name, and all the topographical details of Morus's alleged meetings with her, there is enough and more than enough. Claudia Pelletta at Geneva, and Bontia at Leyden, pull Morus between them page after page: not that they only have claims, for in one sentence we hear of an insulted widow somewhere in Holland, and in another of a dubious female figure seen one rainy night with Morus in a street in Amsterdam. But Bontia is still Milton's favourite. He repeats the Latin epigram about her and Morus; he apologizes for having hitherto called her Pontia, attributes the error to a misreading of the MS. of that epigram when it first came from Holland, but says he still thinks Pontia the prettier name; and, using information that had recently reached him, though we have been in prior possession of something equivalent (Vol. IV. p. 465), he thus reminds Morus of his most memorable meeting with that brave damsel:—

"You remember perhaps that day, nay I am sure you remember the day, and the hour and the place too, when, as I think, you and Pontia [he still keeps to the form 'Pontia'] last met in the house of Salmasius—you to renounce the marriage-bond, she to make you name the day for the nuptials. When she saw, on the contrary, that it was your intention to dissolve the marriage-engagement made in the seduction, then lo! your unmarried bride, for I will not call her Tisiphone, not able to bear such a wrong, flew furiously at your face and eyes with uncut nails. You who, on the testimony of Crantzius (for it is right that so great a contest should not begin without quotation from your own Fides Publica)—you who, on the testimony of Crantzius, were altier in French, or fiercish in Latin, and on the testimony of Diodati had terrible spurs for self-defence, prepare to do your manly utmost in this feminine kind of fight. Madame de Saumaise stands by as Juno, arbiter of the contest, Salmasius himself, lying in the next room ill with the gout, when he heard the battle begun, almost dies with laughing. But alas! and O fie! our unwarlike Alexander, no match for his Amazon, falls down vanquished. She, getting her man underneath, then first, from her position of vantage, goes at his forehead, his eye-brows, his nose; with wonderful arabesques, and in a Phrygian style of execution, she runs her finger-points over the whole countenace of her prostrate subject: never were you less pleased, Morus, with Pontia's lines of beauty. At last, with difficulty, either margin of his cheeks fully written on, but the chin not yet finished, up he rises, a man, by your leave, absolutely nail-perfect, no mere Professor now but a Pontifical Doctor,—for you might have inscribed upon him, as on a painting, Pontia fecit. [We see now the reason for keeping to the form 'Pontia.'] Doctor? Nay rather a codex in which his vengeful critic had scraped her adverse comments with a new stilus. You felt then, I think, Ulac's Tables of Tangents and Secants, to a radius of I know not how many painful ciphers, printed on your skin."

How does Milton meet Morus's protestations of his innocence both at Geneva and in Leyden, and the evidence he adduces in his behalf? Respecting the protestations, he notes that they are merely general and that, like his denials of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, they are worded equivocally or indistinctly. Why does he not deny the Pelletta charge and the Bontia charge, and the other charges, one by one specifically, and in a downright manner? Why does he not go back to Geneva, face the living witnesses and the documentary evidence there waiting him, and abide the issue? As for the decisions in his favour in the Bontia case by the Walloon Synod and the Supreme Court of Holland, of what worth are they? One could see, one had even been informed, that there had been influences at work with both tribunals to procure the result, such as it was. Many good, but easy, men had thought it best, for the reputation of the Christian ministry, not to rake too deeply into such an unpleasant business. Especially in the Synod the proceedings had been a farce. When Riverius, the moderator of the Synod, at the close of the proceedings, had said to Morus, "Never was a Moor so whitewashed as you have been to-day," could not everybody, with any sense of humour, perceive that the Reverend gentleman had been joking? Then, what had been the formal decision of the Synod? "That nothing had been found in the papers of weight to take away from the Churches their wonted liberty of inviting M. Morus to preach when there was occasion." Was that a whitewashing with which to be content? No wonder that Morus had taken refuge among his paper testimonials. About the whole system of Testimonials Milton is considerably dubious. He does not deny that a public testimonial may be an honour, and that there may be proper occasion for such things; but, real discernment of merit being rare, and those who give and those who seek testimonials being but a jumble of the good and the bad together, the abuses of the system bring it into discredit. "The man of highest quality needs another's testimonial the least; nor does any good man ever do anything merely to make himself known." Waiving that general question, however, one may examine Morus's testimonials.

This examination of the testimonials is begun in the first or main part of Milton's Pro Se Defensio; but, as Morus had only entered on his testimonials in the Fides Publica as originally published, and presented most of them in his Supplementum to that book, so Milton prolongs this branch of his criticism into an appendix entitled separately Authoris ad Aleasandri Mori Supplementum Responsio ("The Author's Answer to Alexander More's Supplement.") Prom the first sentences of this Appendix we learn that the preceding part of Milton's book had been written two months before the Supplementum had come into his hands.

Morus's published Testimonials divide themselves chronologically, it may have been observed, into three sets—(1) those given him at Geneva early in the year 1648, and brought by him into Holland on his removal thither, (2) those given him at Middleburg between Nov. 1649 and Aug. 1652, and (3) the three given him at Amsterdam in July 1654, after Milton's Defensio Secunda had appeared, and in contradiction of statements made in that book.—On the Genevese set of Testimonials, including that from the venerable Diodati, Milton's criticism, in substance, is that they were vitiated by their date. They had been given, or obtained by hard begging, not perhaps before the Pelletta scandal had been heard of, but before it had been sufficiently notorious, and while it still seemed credible to many that Morus was innocent, and others were good-naturedly willing to stop the investigation by speeding him off to another scene, Theodore Tronchin, pastor and Professor of Theology, and Mermilliod and Pittet, two other pastors, had been the first movers, among the Genevese clergy, for an inquiry into Morus's conduct; the elder Spanheim had, as Milton believed, been one of those that even then would have nothing to do with the Testimonials; the aged Diodati had then for some time ceased to attend the meetings of his brethren, and might not know all. But, in any case, nearly a year had elapsed between the date of the last of those Genevese Testimonials which Morus had published and Morus's actual departure from Geneva. During that interval there had been a progress of Genevese opinion on the subject of his character and conduct, and he had been furnished with fresh papers in the nature of farewell Testimonials. Morus had suppressed those. Would he venture to produce them?—On the Middleburg Testimonials the criticism is that they do not matter much one way or another, but that they show Morus on the whole to have soon been found a troublesome person in Holland also, some business about whom was always coming up in the Walloon Synods. In Middleburg too there had been a progress of opinion about him with farther experience. His co-pastor there. M. Jean Long, who had been his firm friend for a while, and had signed some of the testimonials, was now understood to speak of him with absolute detestation. Morus having produced some of these testimonials to disprove Milton's assertion that he had been ejected by the Middleburg church, Milton explains that he had not said ejected, but only turned adrift, and that this was substantially the fact. Now, however, if Durie's report is correct, not only would the single Middleburg church, but nearly the whole Walloon Synod also, willingly eject him.—Milton's greatest difficulty is with the three Amsterdam testimonials of July 1654. He has to admit that they prove him to have been misinformed when he said that the Amsterdam authorities had interdicted Morus from the pulpit, just as he had been wrong in calling Morus's Amsterdam professorship that of Greek. That admission made (and it was hard for Milton ever to admit he was wrong, even in a trifle), he contents himself with quoting sentences from the Amsterdam testimonials to show how merely formal they were, how little hearty, and with this characteristic observation about the Amsterdam dignitaries, tossing their testimony aside in any case: "Et id nescio, [Greek: aristinden] an [Greek: ploutinden], virtute an censu, magistratum ilium in civitate sua obtineant: And I know not, moreover, whether it is by merit or by wealth that the gentlemen hold that magistracy in their city." This is, doubtless, Milton's return for the slighting mention of himself in the Amsterdam testimonials.[1]

[Footnote 1: A Hague correspondent of Thurloe, commenting on the appearance of the first part of Morus's Fides Publica and its abrupt ending had written, Nov. 3, 1654, thus: "The truth is Morus durst not add the sentence [text of the judicial finding] against Pontia; for the charges are recompensed [costs allowed her], and where there is payment of charges that is to say that the action of Pontia is good, but that the proofs fail.... The attestations of his life at Amsterdam and at the Hague, he could not get them to his fancy" (Thurloe, 11.708).]

While we have thus given, with tolerable completeness, an abstract of Milton's extraordinary Pro Se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum, we have by no means noticed everything in it that might be of interest in the study of Milton's character. There is, for example, one very curious passage in which Milton, in reply to a criticism of Morus, defends his use of very gross words (verba nuda et praetextata) in speaking of very gross things. He makes two daring quotations, one from Piso's Annals and the other from Sallust, to show that he had good precedent; and he cites Herodotus, Seneca, Suetonius, Plutarch, Erasmus, Thomas More, Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, Lactantlas, Eusebius, and the Bible itself, as examples occasionally of the very reverse of a squeamish euphemism. Of even greater interest is a passage in which he foresees the charges of cruelty, ruthlessness, and breach of literary etiquette, likely to be brought against him on account of his treatment of Morus, and expounds his theory on that subject. The passage may fitly conclude our account of the Pro Se Defensio:—

"To defame the bad and to praise the good, the one on the principle of severe punishment and the other on that of high reward, are equally just, and make up together almost the sum of justice; and we see in fact that the two are of nearly equal efficacy for the right management of life. The two things, in short, are so interrelated, and so involved in one and the same act, that the vituperation of the bad may in a sense be called the praising of the good. But, though right, reason, and use are equal on both sides, the acceptability is not the same likewise; for whoever vituperates another bears the burden and imputation of two very heavy things at once,—accusing another, and thinking well of himself. Accordingly, all are ready enough with praise, good and bad alike, and the objects of their praise worthy and unworthy together; but no one either dares or is able to accuse freely and intrepidly but the man of integrity alone. Accustomed in our youth, under so many masters, to make laborious displays of imaginary eloquence, and taught to think that the demonstrative force of the same lies no less in invective than in praise, we certainly do at the desk hack to pieces bravely the traditional tyrants of antiquity. Mezentius, if such is the chance, we slay over again with unsavoury antitheta; or we roast to perfection Phalaris of Agrigentum, as in his own bull, with lamentable bellowing of enthymemes. In the debating room or lecture-room, I mean; for in the State for the most part we rather adore and worship such, and call them most powerful, most great, most august. The proper thing would be either not to have spent our first years in sport as imaginary declaimers, or else, when our country or the State needs, to leave our mere fencing-foils, and venture sometimes into the sun, and dust, and field of battle, to exert real brawn, shake real arms, seek a real foe. The Suffeni and Sophists of the past, on the one hand, the Pharisees and Simons and Hymenaei and Alexanders of the past on the other, we go at with many a weapon: those of the present day, and come to life again in the Church, we praise with studied eulogies, we honour with professorships, and stipends, and chairs, the incomparable men that they are, the highly-learned and saintly. If it comes to the censuring of one of them, if the mask and specious skin of one of them are dragged off, if he is shown to be base within, or even publicly and openly criminal, there are some who, for what purpose or through what timidity I know not, would have him publicly defended by testimonies in his favour rather than marked with due animadversion. My principle, I confess, and as the fact has several times proved, is far enough apart from theirs, inasmuch as, if I have made any profit when young in the literary leisure I then had, whether by the instructions of learned men or by my own lucubrations, I would employ the whole of it to the advantage of life and of the human race, could I range so far, to the utmost of my weak ability. And, if sometimes even out of private enmities public delinquencies come to be exposed and corrected, and I have now, impelled by all possible reasons, prosecuted with most just invective, nor yet without proper result, not an adversary of my own merely, but one who is the common adversary of almost all, a nefarious man, a disgrace to the Reformed Religion and to the sacred order especially, a dishonour to learning, a most pernicious teacher of youth, an unclean ecclesiastic, it will be seen, I hope, by those who are chiefly interested in making an example of him (for why should I not so trust?), that herein I have performed an action neither displeasing to God, nor unwholesome to the Church, nor unuseful to the State."

What a blast this to pursue poor Morus over the Continent! It would seem as if, in expectation of it, he had put himself as far as he could out of hearing. When Milton's Pro Se Defensio appeared, Morus was no longer in France, but in Italy; and it was not till May, 1656, or nine months after, that he reappeared in Holland. Then, as he had outrun by more than a year his formal leave of absence from his Amsterdam professorship, granted Dec, 20, 1654, there seem to have been strict inquiries as to the causes of his long absence. It was explained that he had fallen ill at Florence; it also came out that he had had a very distinguished reception from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and that the Venetian Senate had presented him with a chain of gold for a Latin poem he had written on a recent defeat of the Turks at sea by the Venetian navy; and, what was most to the point, it appeared, by addresses of his own at Amsterdam, and at a meeting of the Walloon Synod at Leyden, that he had found in Italy great opportunities "for advancing the glory of God by the preaching of the Gospel." We know independently that, while in Italy, he had made acquaintance with some of those wits and scholars among whom Milton had moved so delightfully in his visit of 1638-9, and among whom Heinsius had been back in 1652-3, to find that they still remembered Milton, and could talk about him (Vol. IV. pp. 475-476); and it is even startling to have evidence from Moms himself that he exchanged especial compliments at Rome with Milton's old friend Holstenius, the Vatican librarian, and became so very intimate at Florence with Milton's beloved Carlo Dati as to receive from Dati the most affectionate attention and nursing through his illness. And so, all seeming fully satisfied at Amsterdam, he resumed his duties in the Amsterdam School. Not to be long at peace, however. Hardly had he returned when, either on the old charges, now so terrifically reblazoned through Holland by Milton's perseverance for his ruin, or on new charges arising from new incidents, he and the Walloon church-authorities were again at feud. In this uncomfortable state we must leave him for the present.[1]

[Footnote 1: Bayle's Dict, Art. Morus, and Bruce's Life of Morus, pp. 142-145 and 204-205. This last book is a curiosity. One hardly sees why the life and character of Morus should have so fascinated the Rev. Archibald Bruce, who was minister of the Associate Congregation at Whitburn, in Linlithgowshire, from 1768 to 1816, and Professor of Theology there for the Associate Presbyterian Synod for nearly all that time. He was a worthy and learned man, for whom Dr. McCrie, the author of the Life of John Knox, and of the same Presbyterian denomination, entertained a more "profound veneration" than for any other man on earth (see Life of McCrie by his son, edit. 1840, pp. 52-57). He was "a Whig of the Old School," with liberal political opinions in the main, but strongly opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation; which brought him into connexion with Lord George Gordon, of the "No Popery Riots" of 1780. He wrote many books and pamphlets, and kept a printer at Whitburn for his own use. He may have been drawn to Morus by his interest in the history of Presbyterianism abroad, especially as Morus was of Scottish parentage, or by his interest in the proceedings of Presbyterian Church Courts in such cases of scandal as that of Morus. At any rate, he defends Morus throughout most resolutely, and with a good deal of scholarly painstaking. Milton, on the other hand, he thoroughly dislikes, and represents as a most malicious and un-Christian man, consciously untruthful, and of most lax theology to boot. To be sure, he was the author of Paradise Lost; but that much-praised poem had serious religious defects too! There is something actually refreshing in the naivete and courage with which the sturdy Professor of the Associate Synod propounds his own dissent from the common Milton-worship.—The authority for Morus's acquaintanceship in Italy with Holstenius and Dati is the collection of his Latin Poems, a thin quarto, published at Paris in 1669, under the title of Alexandri Mori Poemata. It contains his poem, a longish one in Hexameters, on the victory of the Venetians over the Turks; also verses to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany; also obituary elegiacs to Diodati of Geneva, and several pieces to or on Salmasius. One piece, in elegiacs, is addressed "Ad Franciscum Turretinum, rarae indolis ac summae spei juvenem." This Francis Turretin (so addressed, I suppose, long ago, when he and Morus were in Geneva together) was, if I mistake not, the famous Turretin of Milton's letter about Morus to Ezekiel Spanheim (ante pp. 173-176). Among the other pieces are one to Holstenius and one to Carlo Dati. In the first Morus, speaking of his introduction to Holstenius and to the Vatican library together, says he does not know which seemed to him the greater library. The poem to Dati is of considerable length, in Hexameters, and entitled "AEgri Somnium: ad praestantem virum Carolum Dati" ("An Invalid's Dream: To the excellent Carlo Dati"). It represents Morus as very ill in Florence and thinking himself dying. Should he die in Florence and be buried there, he would have a poetic inscription over his grave to the effect that while alive he also had cultivated the Muses, and begging the passer-by to remember his name ("Qui legis haec obiter, Morique morique memento"). How kind Dati had been to him—Dati, "than whom there is not a better man, the beloved of all the sister Muses, the ornament of his country, having the reputation of being all but unique in Florence for learning in the vanished arts, siren at once in Tuscan, Latin, and Greek! ... This Dati soothed my fever-fits with the music of his liquid singing, and sat by my bed-side, and spoke words of sweetness, which inhere yet in my very marrow." And so Milton's Italian friend of friends (Vol. III. pp. 551-654 and 680-683) had been charitable to poor Morus, whom he knew to be a fugitive from Milton's wrath, and who could name Milton, if at all, only with tears and cursing.]

It is now high time, however, to answer a question which must have suggested itself again and again in the course of our narrative of the Milton and Morus controversy. Who was the real author of the book for which Morus had been so dreadfully punished, and what was the real amount of Morus's responsibility in it?

That Milton's original belief on this subject had been shaken has been already evident. He had written his Defensio Secunda, in firm reliance on the universal report that Morus was the one proper author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, or that it had been concocted between him and Salmasius; and, though Morus's denial of the authorship had been formally conveyed to him before the Defensio Secunda left the press, he had let it go forth as it was, in the conviction that he was still not wrong in the main. The more express and reiterated denials of Morus in the Fides Publica, however, with the references there to another person as the real author, though Morus was not at liberty to divulge his name, had produced an effect. The authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was then indeed a secondary question, inasmuch as in the Fides Publica Morus had interposed himself personally,—not only in self-defence, but also for counter-attack on Milton. Still, as the Fides Publica would never have been written had not Milton assumed Morus to be the author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor and dragged him before the world solely on that account, Milton had necessarily, in replying to the Fides Publica, adverted to the secondary question. His assertion now, i.e, in the Pro Se Defensio, was a modified one. It was that, whatever facts had yet to be revealed respecting the authorship of the four or five parts of the compound book severally, he yet knew for certain that Morus had been the editor of the whole book, the corrector of the press for the whole, the busy and ostentatious agent in the circulation of early copies, and the writer at least of the Dedicatory Preface to Charles II., put forth in Ulac's name. The question for us now is how far this modified assertion of Milton was correct.

Almost to a tittle, it was. That Morus was the editor of the book, the corrector of the press, and the active agent in the circulation of early copies, may be taken as established by the documentary proofs furnished by Milton, and is corroborated by independent evidence known to ourselves long ago (Vol. IV. pp. 459-465). But was he also partially the author? Here too Milton's evidence may be taken as conclusive, so far as respects the Dedicatory Epistle to Charles II. That Epistle, with its enormous praises of Salmasius, and its extremely malignant notice of Milton, was undoubtedly by Morus, for copies of it signed by himself were still extant. So far, therefore, Milton was right in saying that Morus's denial of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor was an equivocation, resting on a tacit distinction between the body of the book and the additional or editorial matter. In several passages Morus himself had betrayed this equivocation, but in none so remarkably as in a sentence to the peculiar phrasing of which we called attention in quoting it (ante p. 159). Protesting that he had not so much as known the fact of Milton's blindness at the time of the publication of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, and therefore could not have been guilty of the heartless allusion to it in the Dedicatory Epistle, he there said, "If anything occurred to me that might seem to look that way, I referred to the mind,"—a phrase which it is difficult to construe otherwise than as an admission that he had written the Dedicatory Epistle, but had employed the familiar quotation there ("monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum") only metaphorically. All in all, then, the authorship of the Dedicatory Epistle, as well as the editorship and adoption of the whole anonymous book, is fastened upon Morus. With this amount of responsibility fastened upon him, however, Morus must be dismissed, and another person brought to the bar. He was the Rev. DR. PETER DU MOULIN the younger.

The Du Moulins were a French family, well known in England. The father, Dr. Peter Du Moulin the elder (called Molinaeus in Latin), was a French Protestant theologian of great celebrity. He had resided for a good while in England in the reign of James I., officiating as French minister in London, and in much credit with the King and others; but, on the death of James, he had returned to France. At our present date he was still alive at the age of eighty-seven, and still not so much out of the world but that people in different countries continued to think of him as a contemporary and to quote his writings. There are references to him, far from disrespectful, in one of Milton's Anti-Episcopal Pamphlets in reply to Bishop Hall.[1] Two of his sons, both born in France, had settled permanently in England, and had become passionately interested in English public affairs, though in very different directions.—The younger of these, LEWIS DU MOULIN, born 1606, having taken the degree of Doctor of Physic at Leyden, had come to England when but a young man, and, after having been incorporated in the same degree at Cambridge (1684), had been in medical practice in London. At the beginning of the Long Parliament, he had taken the Parliamentarian side, and had written, under the name of "Irenaeus Philalethes," two Latin pamphlets against Bishop Hall's Episcopacy by Divine Right—pamphlets very much in the same vein of root-and-branch Church Reform as those of the Smectymnuans and Milton at the same time. Since then, still adhering to the Parliament through the Civil War, he had become well known as an Independent—much, it is said, to the chagrin of his old father, who was a Presbyterian, with leanings to moderate Episcopacy; and in 1647, in the Parliamentary visitation of the University of Oxford, he had been rewarded with the Camden Professorship of History in that University. He had been made M.D. of Oxford in 1649. At least three publications had come from his pen since his appointment to the Professorship, one of them a Translation into Latin (1650) of the first chapter of Milton's Eikonoklastes. From this we should infer, what is independently likely, that he was acquainted with Milton personally.[2]—Very different from the Independent and Commonwealth's man Lewis Du Monlin. M.D. and History Professor of Oxford, was his elder brother PETER DU MOULIN, D.D. Born in 1600, he had been educated, like his brother, at Leyden, and had taken his D.D. degree there. He is first heard of in England in 1640, when he was incorporated in the same degree at Cambridge; and at the beginning of the Civil War he was so far a naturalised Englishman as to be Rector of Wheldrake, near York. From that time, though a zealous Calvinist theologically, he was as intensely Royalist and Episcopalian as his brother was Parliamentarian and Independent. So we learn most distinctly from a brief MS. sketch of his life through the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, written by himself after the Restoration, for insertion into a copy of the second edition of one of his books, of date 1660, presented by him to the library of Canterbury Cathedral. "Our gracious King and now glorious Martyr, Charles the First, he there says, finding that his rebellious subjects, not content to make war against him in his kingdom, assaulted him with another war out of his kingdom with their tongues and pens, he set out a Declaration to invite all his loving subjects and friends that could use the tongues of the neighbouring states to represent with their pens the justice of his cause, especially to Protestant Churches abroad. That Declaration smote my heart, as particularly addressed to me; and I took it as a command laid upon me by God himself. Whereupon I made a solemn vow to God that, as far as Latin and French could go in the world, I would make the justice of the King's and the Church's cause to be known, especially to the Protestants of France and the Low Countries, whom the King's enemies did chiefly labour to seduce and misinform. To pay my vow, I first made this book" [entitled originally "Apologie de la Religion Reformee, et de la Monarchie et de I'Eglise d'Angleterre, contre les Calomnies de la Ligue Rebelle de quelques Anglois et Ecossois"; but in an imperfect English translation the title was afterwards changed into "History of the Presbyterians", and in the second French edition, on a copy of which Du Moulin was now writing, it became "Histoire des Nouveaux Presbyteriens, Anglois et Ecossois"]—which was begun "at York, during the siege [i.e. June 1644, just before Marston Moor], in a room whose chimney was beaten down by the cannon while I was at my work; and, after the siege and my expulsion from my Rectory at Wheldrake, it was finished in an underground cellar, where I lay hid to avoid warrants that were out against me from committees to apprehend me and carry me prisoner to Hull. Having finished the book, I sent it to be printed in Holland by the means of an officer of the Master of the Posts at London, Mr. Pompeo Calandrini, who was doing great and good services to the King in that place. But, the King being dead, and the face of public businesses altered, I sent for my MS. out of Holland, and reformed it for the new King's service. And it was printed, but very negligently, by Samuel Browne at the Hague [1649?] ... Much about the same time I set out my Latin Poem, Ecclesiae Gemitus ('Groans of the Church'), with, a long Epistle to all Christians in the defence of the King and the Church of England; and, two years after [1652], Clamor Regii Sanguinis ad Coelum. God blessed these books, and gave them the intended effect, the disabusing of many misinformed persons. And it was so well resented by his Majesty, then at Breda, that, being showed my sister Mary among a great company of ladies, he brake the crowd to salute her, and tell her that he was very sensible of his obligations to her brother, and that, if ever God settled him in his kingdom, he would make him know that he was a grateful prince." Here, then, in Dr. Peter Du Moulin's own hand, though not till after the Restoration, we have the Regii Sanguinis Clamor claimed as his, with the information that it was one of a series of books written by him with the special design of maintaining the cause of Charles II. and discrediting the Commonwealth among Continental Protestants.[3]

[Footnote 1: See close of Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence.]

[Footnote 2: Wood's Fasti, II. 125-126; Whitlocke, II. 290. The writings of Lewis Du Moulin I have here mentioned are known to me only by the titles and descriptions given by Wood and his annotator Dr. Bliss.]

[Footnote 3: Wood's Fasti, II. 195; and Gentleman's Magazine for 1773, pp. 369-370. In the last is given the autobiographic sketch of Du Moulin, transcribed from the copy of his Histoire des Nouveaux Presbyteriens (edit. 1660) in the Canterbury Library.—The Mary du Moulin, the sister of Peter and Lewis, mentioned in the autobiographic sketch, died at the Hague in Feb. 1699, having, like most of the Du Moulins, attained a great age. The father, Dr. Peter the elder, died in 1658 at the age of ninety; Lewis died in 1683 at the age of seventy-seven; and Peter the younger, of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, died in 1684 at the age of eighty-four.—The reader will have noted the Pompeo Calandrini mentioned as an official in the London Post Office in the time of the Civil War, and as secretly aiding Charles I. in his correspondence. He was, doubtless, of the Italian-Genevese family of Calandrinis already mentoned, ante pp. 172-173 and footnote.]

Yet farther proof on the subject, also from Dr. Peter's own hand. In the Library of Canterbury Cathedral there is, or was, his own copy of the original edition of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor; and in that copy the preliminary Dedicatory Epistle in Ulac's name to Charles II. is marked for deletion, and has these words prefixed to it in Du Moulin's hand; "Epistola, quam aiunt esse Alexandri Mori, quae mihi valde non probatur" ("Epistle which they say is by Alexander Morus, and which is not greatly to my taste"),[1] All the rest, therefore, was his own. But, to remove all possible doubt, we have the still more complete and exact information furnished by him in 1670, Milton then still alive and in the first fame of his Paradise Lost. In that year there appeared from the Cambridge University Press a volume entitled Petri Molinaei P. F. [Greek: Parerga]: Poematum Libelli Tres. It was a collection of Dr. Peter Du Moulin's Latin Poems, written at various times of his life, and now arranged by him in three divisions, separately title-paged, entitled respectively "Hymns to the Apostles' Creed," "Groans of the Church" (Ecclesiae Gemitus), and "Varieties." In the second division were reprinted the two Latin Poems that had originally formed part of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, with their full titles as at first: to wit, the "Eucharistic Ode," to the great Salmasius for his Defensio Regia, and the set of scurrilous Iambics "To the Bestial Blackguard John Milton, Parricide and Advocate of the Parricide." With reference to the last there are several explanations for the reader in Latin prose at different points in the volume. At one place the reader is assured that, though the Iambics against Milton, and some other things in the volume, may seem savage, zeal for Religion and the Church, in their hour of sore trial, had been a sufficient motive for writing them, and they must not be taken as indicating the private character of the author, as known well enough to his friends. At another place (pp. 141-2 of the volume) there is, by way of afterthought or extension, a larger and more express statement about the Iambics against Milton, which must here be translated in full: "Into what danger I was thrown," says Du Moulin, "by the first appearance of this Poem in the Clamor Regii Sanguinis would not seem to me worthy of public notice now, were it not that the miracle of divine protection by which I was kept safe is most worthy of the common admiration of the good and the praise of the Supreme Deliverer. I had sent my manuscript sheets to the great Salmasius, who entrusted them to the care of that most learned man, Alexander Morus. This Morus delivered them to the printer, and prefixed to them an Epistle to the King, in the Printer's name, exceedingly eloquent and full of good matter. When that care of Morus over the business of printing the book had become known to Milton through the spies of the Regicides in Holland, Milton held it as an ascertained fact that Morus was the author of the Clamor; whence that most virulent book of Milton's against Morus, entitled Defensio Secunda pro Populo Anglicano. It had the effect, moreover, of making enemies for Morus in Holland; for at that time the English Tyrants were very much feared in foreign parts. Meanwhile I looked on in silence, and not without a soft chuckle, at seeing my bantling laid at another man's door, and the blind and furious Milton fighting and slashing the air, like the hoodwinked horse-combatants in the old circus, not knowing by whom he was struck and whom he struck in return. But Morus, unable to stand out against so much ill-will, began to cool in the King's cause, and gave Milton to know who the author of the Clamor really was (Clamoris authorem Miltono indicavit). For, in fact, in his Reply to Milton's attack he produced two witnesses, of the highest credit among the rebels, who might have well known the author, and could divulge him on being asked. Thus over me and my head there hung the most certain destruction. But that great Guardian of Justice, to whom I had willingly devoted both my labour and my life, wrought out my safety through Milton's own pride, as it is customary with His Wisdom to bring good out of evil, and light out of darkness. For Milton, who had gone full tilt at Morus with his canine eloquence, and who had made it almost the sole object of his Defensio Secunda to cut up the life and reputation of Morus, never could be brought to confess that he had been so grossly mistaken: fearing, I suppose, that the public would make fun of his blindness, and that grammar-school boys would compare him to that blind Catullus in Juvenal who, meaning to praise the fish presented to Domitian,