eroes of the Commonwealth. Among various
replies to his "Defensio," not deserving of notice here, appeared one of
especial acrimony, "Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum," published about
August, 1652. It was a prodigy of scurrilous invective, bettering the
bad example which Milton had set (but which hundreds in that age had set
him) of ridiculing Salmasius's foibles when he should have been
answering his arguments. Having been in Italy, he was taxed with Italian
vices: he 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 scr