They seared and scathed a literary dictator whom jealous enemies had long sighed to behold insulted and humiliated, while surprise equalled delight at seeing the blow dealt from a quarter so utterly unexpected.  There is no comparison between the invective of Milton and of Salmasius; not so much from Milton’s superiority as a controversialist, though this is very evident, as because he writes under the inspiration of a true passion.  His scorn of the presumptuous intermeddler who has dared to libel the people of England is ten thousand times more real than Salmasius’s official indignation at the execution of Charles.  His contempt for Salmasius’s pedantry is quite genuine; and he revels in ecstasies of savage glee when taunting the apologist of tyranny with his own notorious subjection to a tyrannical wife.  But the reviler in Milton is too far ahead of the reasoner.  He seems to set more store by his personalities than by his principles.  On the question of the legality of Charles’s execution he has indeed little argument to offer; and his views on the wider question of the general responsibility of kings, sound and noble in themselves, suffer from the mass of irrelevant quotation with which it was in that age necessary to prop them up.  The great success of his reply ("Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio”) arose mainly from the general satisfaction that Salmasius should at length have met with his match.  The book, published in or about March, 1651, instantly won over European public opinion, so far as the question was a literary one.  Every distinguished foreigner then resident in London, Milton says, either called upon him to congratulate him, or took the opportunity of a casual meeting.  By May, says Heinsius, five editions were printed or printing in Holland, and two translations.  “I had expected nothing of such quality from the Englishman,” writes Vossius.  The Diet of Ratisbon ordered “that all the books of Miltonius should be searched for and confiscated.”  Parisian magistrates burned it on their own responsibility.  Salmasius himself was then at Stockholm, where Queen Christina, who did not, like Catherine II., recognize the necessity of “standing by her order,” could not help letting him see that she regarded Milton as the victor.  Vexation, some thought, contributed as much as climate to determine his return to Holland.  He died in September, 1653, at Spa, as, remote from books, but making his memory his library, he was penning his answer.  This unfinished production, edited by his son, appeared after the Restoration, when the very embers of the controversy had grown cold, and the palm of literary victory had been irrevocably adjudged to Milton.