MILTON’S OWN CHARACTER AND REPUTATION:—­“Do not think, obscurely though you live, that, because you have had the first innings in this game in the art of slander, you therefore stand aloft beyond the reach of darts.  You have not the ring of Gyges to make you invisible.  Your virtues are taken note of.  You are not such a person, my friend, that Fame should fear to tell lies even about you; and, unless Fame lies, there is not a meaner or more worthless man going, and nothing is clearer than that you estimate by your own morals the characters of other people.  But I hope Fame lies in this.  For who could hear without the greatest pain—­what I for my part hardly, nay not to the extent of hardly, bring my mind to credit—­that there is a man living among Christians who, being himself a concrete of every form of outrageous iniquity, could so censure others?”

MILTON’S PRODIGIOUS SELF-ESTEEM:—­“All which has so elated you that you would be reckoned next after the very first man in England, and sometimes put yourself higher than the supreme Cromwell himself; whom you name familiarly, without giving him any title of rank, whom you lecture under the guise of praising him, to whom you dictate laws, assign boundaries to his rights, prescribe duties, suggest counsels, and even hold out threats if he shall not behave accordingly.  You grant him arms and rule; you claim genius and the gown for yourself. ‘He only is to be called great,’ you say, ’who has either done great things’—­Cromwell, to wit!—–­’or teaches great things’—­Milton on Divorce, to wit!—­’or writes of them worthily’—­the same twice-great Milton, I suppose, in his Defence of the English People!”

How does Morus proceed in the main business of clearing his own character from Milton’s charges?  His plan was to produce a dated and authenticated series of testimonials from others, extending over the period of his life which had been attacked, and to interweave these with explanations and an autobiographic memoir.  He has reached the eightieth page of his book before he properly begins this enterprise.  He gives first a testimonial from the Genevan Church, dated Jan. 25, 1648, and signed by seventeen ministers, of whom Diodati is one; then another from the Genevan Senate or Town Council, dated Jan. 26, 1648; then two more, one from the Church again, and one from the Senate again, both dated April 1648; then, among others, a special testimonial from Diodati, in the form of a long letter to Salmasius, dated “Geneva, 9th May, 1648.”  Diodati’s testimonial, which is given both in French and in Latin, is the most interesting in itself, and will represent the others.  “As to his morals,” says Diodati, writing of Morus to Salmasius, “I can speak from intimate knowledge, and do so with, strict conscientiousness.  His natural disposition is good and without deceit or reservation, frank and noble, such as ought to put him in very harmonious relations with all persons