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.