all his sarcasms on my sacred office and profession....  For, if you had taken out of your book all the reproaches thrown at me, how little would there have been, certainly not more than a few pages, remaining for your “People”!  What fine things would have perished, what flowery, I had almost said Floralian, expressions!  What would have become of your “gardens of Alcinous and Adonis,” of your little story about “Hortensius”; what of the “syca_more_,” what of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” what of the “Mulberry tree”? [All these are phrases in Milton’s book, introduced whenever he refers circumstantially to the naughty particulars of the scandals against Morus, whether in Geneva or in Leyden.  The name Morus, which means “mulberry tree” and “fool” in Latin and Greek, and may be taken also for “Moor” or “Ethiop,” and in still other meanings, had yielded to the Dutch wits, as well as to Milton, no end of metaphors and punning etymologies in their squibs against the poor man] ...  The real author of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor neither lives among the Dutch,—­is not “stabled” among them, to use your own expression—­nor has he, I believe, anything in common with them ...  Vehemently and almost tragically you complain that I have upbraided you with your blindness.  I can positively affirm that I did not know till I read it in your own book that you had lost your eyesight.  For, if anything occurred to me that might seem to look that way, I referred to the mind [Note this sentence:  the Latin is “Nam, si quid forte se dabat quod eo spectare videretur, ad animum referebam”] ...  Could I then upbraid you with blindness who did not know that you were blind,—­with personal deformity who believed you even good-looking, chiefly in consequence of having seen the rather neat likeness of you prefixed to your Poems [Marshall’s ludicrous botch of 1645 which Milton had disowned] ...  Nor did I know any more that you had written on Divorce.  I have never read that book of yours; I have never seen it ...  I will have done with this subject.  That book is not mine.  I have published, and shall yet publish, other books, not one letter of which shall you, while I am alive and aware of it, attack with impunity.  Some Sermons of mine are in men’s hands; my books On Grace and Free Will are to be had; there are in print my Exercitations on the Holy Scripture, or on the Cause of God, which I know have passed into England, so that you have no excuse,—­as well as my Apology for Calvin, dedicated to the illustrious Usher of Armagh, your countryman, my very great friend, whose highly honourable opinion of me, if the golden old man would permit, I would put against a thousand Miltons.  With God’s help others will appear, some of which, as but partly finished, I am keeping back, while others are ready for issue. [A list of some of these, including Orationes Argumenti Sacri, cum Poematiis:  the list closed with a statement that he has mentioned only his Latin works, and not his French Sermons].

Every now and then there is a passage of retaliation on Milton.  Here are two specimens: