would have been accused of cannibalism had his path
lain towards the Caribee Islands. A fulsome dedication
to Salmasius tended to fix the suspicion of authorship
upon Alexander Morus, a Frenchman of Scotch extraction,
Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, and pastor
of the Walloon Church, then an inmate of Salmasius’s
house, who actually had written the dedication and
corrected the proof. The real author, however,
was Peter Du Moulin, ex-rector of Wheldrake, in Yorkshire.
The dedicatory ink was hardly dry ere Morus was involved
in a desperate quarrel with Salmasius through the
latter’s imperious wife, who accused Morus of
having been over-attentive to her English waiting-maid,
whose patronymic is lost to history under the Latinized
form of Bontia. Failing to make Morus marry the
damsel, she sought to deprive him of his ecclesiastical
and professorial dignities. The correspondence
of Heinsius and Vossius shows what intense amusement
the affair occasioned to such among the scholars of
the period as were unkindly affected towards Salmasius.
Morus was ultimately acquitted, but his position in
Holland had become uncomfortable, and he was glad to
accept an invitation from the congregation at Charenton,
celebrated for its lunatics. Understanding, meanwhile,
that Milton was preparing a reply, and being naturally
unwilling to brave invective in the cause of a book
which he had not written, and of a patron who had cast
him off, he protested his innocence of the authorship,
and sought to ward off the coming storm by every means
short of disclosing the writer. Milton, however,
esteeming his Latin of much more importance than Morus’s
character, and justly considering with Voltaire, “que
cet Habacuc etait capable de tout,” persisted
in exhibiting himself as the blind Cyclop dealing
blows amiss. His reply appeared in May, 1654,
and a rejoinder by Morus produced a final retort in
August, 1655. Both are full of personalities,
including a spirited description of the scratching
of Morus’s face by the injured Bontia.
These may sink into oblivion, while we may be grateful
for the occasion which led Milton to express himself
with such fortitude and dignity on his affliction and
its alleviations:—“Let the calumniators
of God’s judgments cease to revile me, and to
forge their superstitious dreams about me. Let
them be assured that I neither regret my lot nor am
ashamed of it, that I remain unmoved and fixed in
my opinion, that I neither believe nor feel myself
an object of God’s anger, but actually experience
and acknowledge His fatherly mercy and kindness to
me in all matters of greatest moment—especially
in that I am able, through His consolation and His
strengthening of my spirit, to acquiesce in His divine
will, thinking oftener of what He has bestowed upon
me than of what He has withheld: finally, that
I would not exchange the consciousness of what I have
done with that of any deed of theirs, however righteous,
or part with my always pleasant and tranquil recollection
of the same.” He adds that his friends
cherish him, study his wants, favour him with their
society more assiduously even than before, and that
the Commonwealth treats him with as much honour as
if, according to the customs of the Athenians of old,
it had decreed him public support for his life in the
Prytaneum.