the _Apology_
for Smectymnuus, Milton sets forth his own defence of his acrimony and
violence: "There may be a sanctified bitterness," he remarks, "against
the enemies of the truth;" and he dares to quote the casuistry of Electra
in _Sophocles_:--

'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds,
And your ungodly deeds find me the words.

The exigencies of controversy revealed in Milton not only an
inexhaustible store of coarse invective, but also, at times, the flash of
real wit. "My fate," he says, with some sense of the incongruity of the
thing, "extorts from me a talent of sport, which I had thought to hide in
a napkin." We are privileged to hear Milton laugh. It is not mirthful nor
gentle laughter, but rather the fierce, harsh, vehement laughter of the
Hebrew Psalms, the laughter of scorn, the shooting out of the lips, the
saying "Ha, ha." He speaks with his mouth, and swords are in his lips.
Thus, of Alexander Morus, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, whom
he suspected to be the author of a tract in support of Salmasius, he
says: "There is one More, part Frenchman and part Scot, so that one
country or one people cannot be quite overwhelmed with the whole infamy
of his extraction"; and he indulges himself in a debauch of punning on
_Morus_, the Latin word for a mulberry. In the prelatical controversy,
after discussing with his opponent the meaning of the word "angel," he
continues: "It is not ordination nor jurisdiction that is angelical, but
the heavenly message of the Gospel, which is the office of all ministers
alike.... And if you will contend still for a superiority in one person,
you must ground it better than from this metaphor, which you may now
deplore as the axe-head that fell into the water, and say, 'Alas, master!
for it was borrowed'; unless you have as good a faculty to make iron
swim, as you had to make light froth sink." In the _Apology_ for
Smectymnuus he heaps one grotesque comparison on another. His adversary,
the son of Bishop Hall, is like "some empiric of false accusations to try
his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not." The learning that
was displayed by the champion of Episcopacy and the very typographical
arrangement of his book incur an equal contempt: the margin of his
treatise "is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his
text.... Nor yet content with the wonted room of his margin, but he must
cut out large docks and creeks into his text, to unlade the