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,