cannot for
two whole years have been ignorant of it. But, as you perceived it
would not suit your convenience to vent your spleen against an
anonymous opponent, that is a nobody, and some definite person must
be pitched upon as an adversary to bear your rage expressly, no one
else seemed to you more opportune than I as an object of calumny,
whether because you heard that I had many enemies, though (what
proves their savageness) without any cause, who would hold up both
thumbs in applause of your jocosities, or because you knew that, by
the arts of a Juno, I was involved in a lawsuit, more troublesome
in reality than dangerous, and you did not believe that I should
be, as I have been, the winner before all the tribunals.... Your
book once written, Morus must of necessity stand for your opponent,
or Milton, the Defender of the People, would have done nothing in
two years! He would have lost all the laborious compilation of his
days and nights, all his punnings upon my name, all his sarcasms on
my sacred office and profession.... For, if you had taken out of
your book all the reproaches thrown at me, how little would there
have been, certainly not more than a few pages, remaining for your
"People"! What fine things would have perished, what flowery, I had
almost said Floralian, expressions! What would have become of your
"gardens of Alcinous and Adonis," of your little story about
"Hortensius"; what of the "syca_more_," what of "Pyramus and
Thisbe," what of the "Mulberry tree"? [All these are phrases in
Milton's book, introduced whenever he refers circumstantially to
the naughty particulars of the scandals against Morus, whether in
Geneva or in Leyden. The name _Morus_, which means "mulberry
tree" and "fool" in Latin and Greek, and may be taken also for
"Moor" or "Ethiop," and in still other meanings, had yielded to the
Dutch wits, as well as to Milton, no end of metaphors and punning
etymologies in their squibs against the poor man] ... The real
author of the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_ neither lives among the
Dutch,--is not "stabled" among them, to use your own
expression--nor has he, I believe, anything in common with them ...
Vehemently and almost tragically you complain that I have upbraided
you with your blindness. I can positively affirm that I did not
know till I read it in your own book that you had lost your
eyesight. For, if anything occurre