_qui
domi fere_, _idque libenter_, _me contineo_.' The busy great men of the
day would have been more than astonished, they would have been disgusted,
had they been told that posterity would refer to most of them
compendiously, as having lived in the age of Milton. But this need not
trouble us.

On the Continent Milton enjoyed a wider reputation, on account of his
controversy with the great European scholar, Salmasius, on the
sufficiently important and interesting, and then novel, subject of the
execution of Charles I. Was it justifiable? Salmasius, a scholar and a
Protestant, though of an easy-going description, was employed, or rather,
as he had no wages (Milton's hundred _Jacobuses_ being fictitious),
nominated by Charles, afterwards the Second, to indict the regicides at
the bar of European opinion, which accordingly he did in the Latin
language. The work reached this country in the autumn of 1649, and it
evidently became the duty of somebody to answer it. Two qualifications
were necessary--the replier must be able to read Latin, and to write it
after a manner which should escape the ridicule of the scholars of
Leyden, Geneva, and Paris. Milton occurred to somebody's mind, and the
task was entrusted to him. It is not to be supposed that Cromwell was
ever at the pains to read Salmasius for himself, but still it would not
have done to have it said that the _Defensio Regia_ of so celebrated a
scholar as Salmasius remained unanswered, and so the appointment was
confirmed, and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In March,
1651, his first _Defence of the English People_ was in print. In this
great pamphlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine of the divine
right of kings, the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he
maintains the proposition that, as well by the law of God, as by the law
of nations, and the law of England, a king of England may be brought to
trial and death, the people being discharged from all obligations of
loyalty when a lawful prince becomes a tyrant, or gives himself over to
sloth and voluptuousness. This noble argument, alike worthy of the man
and the occasion, is doubtless over-clouded and disfigured by personal
abuse of Salmasius, whose relations with his wife had surely as little to
do with the head of Charles I. as had poor Mr. Dick's memorial.
Salmasius, it appears, was henpecked, and to allow yourself to be
henpecked was, in Milton's opinion, a high crime and mis