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:—­