Distinct evidence is produced that both at Geneva and in Holland the fama against Morus was still as strong as ever. The evidence takes the form of extracts from two letters received by Milton since the Fides Publica had appeared;—

From a Letter from Geneva, dated Oct. 14, 1654 (i.e. from that letter of Ezekiel Spanheim of which Milton had told Spanheim that he meant to avail himself, though without mentioning the writer's name: sec ante pp. 172-173). "Our people here cannot sufficiently express their wonder that you are so thoroughly acquainted with the private history of a man unknown to you personally, and that you have painted him so in his native colours that not even by those with whom he has been on the most familiar terms could the whole play-acting career of the man (tota, hominis histrionia) have been more accurately or happily set forth; whence they are at a loss, and I with them, to understand with what face, shameless though he is and impudent-mouthed, he is on the point of daring again to appear in the public theatre. For it is the consummation and completeness of your success in this part of the business that you have not brought forward either imagined or otherwise unknown charges against the man, but charges of common repetition in the mouths of all his greatest friends even, and which can be clearly corroborated by the authority and vote of the whole assembly, and even by the accession of farther criminations to the same effect... I would assure you that hardly any one can now longer be found here, where for many years he discharged a public-office, but greatly to the disgrace of this Church, who would dare or undertake longer to lend his countenance to the man's prostituted character."

From a Letter from Durie at Basel, Oct. 3, 1654:—"As regards Morus's vices and profligacy, Hotton does not seem to entertain that opinion of him; I know, however, that others speak very ill of him, that his hands are against nearly everybody and everybody's hands against him, and that many ministers even of the Walloon Synod are doing their best to have him deprived of the pastoral office. Nor here in Basel do I find men's opinion of him different from that in Holland of those who like him least."

The fresh, particulars of information that Milton had received about Morus and his alleged misdeeds are unsparingly brought out. The name of the woman of bad character at Geneva with whom Morus was said to have been implicated there, and the scandal about whom had driven him from Geneva, has now been ascertained by Milton. It was Claudia Pelletta; and of her name, and all the topographical details of Morus's alleged meetings with her, there is enough and more than enough. Claudia Pelletta at Geneva, and Bontia at Leyden, pull Morus between them page after page: not that they only have claims, for in one sentence we hear of an insulted widow somewhere in Holland, and in another of a dubious female figure seen one rainy night with Morus in a street in Amsterdam. But Bontia is still Milton's favourite. He repeats the Latin epigram about her and Morus; he apologizes for having hitherto called her Pontia, attributes the error to a misreading of the MS. of that epigram when it first came from Holland, but says he still thinks Pontia the prettier name; and, using information that had recently reached him, though we have been in prior possession of something equivalent (Vol. IV. p. 465), he thus reminds Morus of his most memorable meeting with that brave damsel:—

"You remember perhaps that day, nay I am sure you remember the day, and the hour and the place too, when, as I think, you and Pontia [he still keeps to the form 'Pontia'] last met in the house of Salmasius—you to renounce the marriage-bond, she to make you name the day for the nuptials. When she saw, on the contrary, that it was your intention to dissolve the marriage-engagement made in the seduction, then lo! your unmarried bride, for I will not call her Tisiphone, not able to bear such a wrong, flew furiously at your face and eyes with uncut nails. You who, on the testimony of Crantzius (for it is right that so great a contest should not begin without quotation from your own Fides Publica)—you who, on the testimony of Crantzius, were altier in French, or fiercish in Latin, and on the testimony of Diodati had terrible spurs for self-defence, prepare to do your manly utmost in this feminine kind of fight. Madame de Saumaise stands by as Juno, arbiter of the contest, Salmasius himself, lying in the next room ill with the gout, when he heard the battle begun, almost dies with laughing. But alas! and O fie! our unwarlike Alexander, no match for his Amazon, falls down vanquished. She, getting her man underneath, then first, from her position of vantage, goes at his forehead, his eye-brows, his nose; with wonderful arabesques, and in a Phrygian style of execution, she runs her finger-points over the whole countenace of her prostrate subject: never were you less pleased, Morus, with Pontia's lines of beauty. At last, with difficulty, either margin of his cheeks fully written on, but the chin not yet finished, up he rises, a man, by your leave, absolutely nail-perfect, no mere Professor now but a Pontifical Doctor,—for you might have inscribed upon him, as on a painting, Pontia fecit. [We see now the reason for keeping to the form 'Pontia.'] Doctor? Nay rather a codex in which his vengeful critic had scraped her adverse comments with a new stilus. You felt then, I think, Ulac's Tables of Tangents and Secants, to a radius of I know not how many painful ciphers, printed on your skin."

How does Milton meet Morus's protestations of his innocence both at Geneva and in Leyden, and the evidence he adduces in his behalf? Respecting the protestations, he notes that they are merely general and that, like his denials of the authorship of the Regii Sanguinis Clamor, they are worded equivocally or indistinctly. Why does he not deny the Pelletta charge and the Bontia charge, and the other charges, one by one specifically, and in a downright manner? Why does he not go back to Geneva, face the living witnesses and the documentary evidence there waiting him, and abide the issue? As for the decisions in his favour in the Bontia case by the Walloon Synod and the Supreme Court of Holland, of what worth are they? One could see, one had even been informed, that there had been influences at work with both tribunals to procure the result, such as it was. Many good, but easy, men had thought it best, for the reputation of the Christian ministry, not to rake too deeply into such an unpleasant business. Especially in the Synod the proceedings had been a farce. When Riverius, the moderator of the Synod, at the close of the proceedings, had said to Morus, "Never was a Moor so whitewashed as you have been to-day," could not everybody, with any sense of humour, perceive that the Reverend gentleman had been joking? Then, what had been the formal decision of the Synod? "That nothing had been found in the papers of weight to take away from the Churches their wonted liberty of inviting M. Morus to preach when there was occasion." Was that a whitewashing with which to be content? No wonder that Morus had taken refuge among his paper testimonials. About the whole system of Testimonials Milton is considerably dubious. He does not deny that a public testimonial may be an honour, and that there may be proper occasion for such things; but, real discernment of merit being rare, and those who give and those who seek testimonials being but a jumble of the good and the bad together, the abuses of the system bring it into discredit. "The man of highest quality needs another's testimonial the least; nor does any good man ever do anything merely to make himself known." Waiving that general question, however, one may examine Morus's testimonials.

This examination of the testimonials is begun in the first or main part of Milton's Pro Se Defensio; but, as Morus had only entered on his testimonials in the Fides Publica as originally published, and presented most of them in his Supplementum to that book, so Milton prolongs this branch of his criticism into an appendix entitled separately Authoris ad Aleasandri Mori Supplementum Responsio ("The Author's Answer to Alexander More's Supplement.") Prom the first sentences of this Appendix we learn that the preceding part of Milton's book had been written two months before the Supplementum had come into his hands.

Morus's published Testimonials divide themselves chronologically, it may have been observed, into three sets—(1) those given him at Geneva early in the year 1648, and brought by him into Holland on his removal thither, (2) those given him at Middleburg between Nov. 1649 and Aug. 1652, and (3) the three given him at Amsterdam in July 1654, after Milton's Defensio Secunda had appeared, and in contradiction of statements made in that book.—On the Genevese set of Testimonials, including that from the venerable Diodati, Milton's criticism, in substance, is that they were vitiated by their date. They had been given, or obtained by hard begging, not perhaps before the Pelletta scandal had been heard of, but before it had been sufficiently notorious, and while it still seemed credible to many that Morus was innocent, and others were good-naturedly willing to stop the investigation by speeding him off to another scene, Theodore Tronchin, pastor and Professor of Theology, and Mermilliod and Pittet, two other pastors, had been the first movers, among the Genevese clergy, for an inquiry into Morus's conduct; the elder Spanheim had, as Milton believed, been one of those that even then would have nothing to do with the Testimonials; the aged Diodati had then for some time ceased to attend the meetings of his brethren, and might not know all. But, in any case, nearly a year had elapsed between the date of the last of those Genevese Testimonials which Morus had published and Morus's actual departure from Geneva. During that interval there had been a progress of Genevese opinion on the subject of his character and conduct, and he had been furnished with fresh papers in the nature of farewell Testimonials. Morus had suppressed those. Would he venture to produce them?—On the Middleburg Testimonials the criticism is that they do not matter much one way or another, but that they show Morus on the whole to have soon been found a troublesome person in Holland also, some business about whom was always coming up in the Walloon Synods. In Middleburg too there had been a progress of opinion about him with farther experience. His co-pastor there. M. Jean Long, who had been his firm friend for a while, and had signed some of the testimonials, was now understood to speak of him with absolute detestation. Morus having produced some of these testimonials to disprove Milton's assertion that he had been ejected by the Middleburg church, Milton explains that he had not said ejected, but only turned adrift, and that this was substantially the fact. Now, however, if Durie's report is correct, not only would the single Middleburg church, but nearly the whole Walloon Synod also, willingly eject him.—Milton's greatest difficulty is with the three Amsterdam testimonials of July 1654. He has to admit that they prove him to have been misinformed when he said that the Amsterdam authorities had interdicted Morus from the pulpit, just as he had been wrong in calling Morus's Amsterdam professorship that of Greek. That admission made (and it was hard for Milton ever to admit he was wrong, even in a trifle), he contents himself with quoting sentences from the Amsterdam testimonials to show how merely formal they were, how little hearty, and with this characteristic observation about the Amsterdam dignitaries, tossing their testimony aside in any case: "Et id nescio, [Greek: aristindên] an [Greek: ploutindên], virtute an censu, magistratum ilium in civitate suâ obtineant: And I know not, moreover, whether it is by merit or by wealth that the gentlemen hold that magistracy in their city." This is, doubtless, Milton's return for the slighting mention of himself in the Amsterdam testimonials.1

1: A Hague correspondent of Thurloe, commenting on the appearance of the first part of Morus's Fides Publica and its abrupt ending had written, Nov. 3, 1654, thus: "The truth is Morus durst not add the sentence [text of the judicial finding] against Pontia; for the charges are recompensed [costs allowed her], and where there is payment of charges that is to say that the action of Pontia is good, but that the proofs fail.... The attestations of his life at Amsterdam and at the Hague, he could not get them to his fancy" (Thurloe, 11.708).

While we have thus given, with tolerable completeness, an abstract of Milton's extraordinary Pro Se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum, we have by no means noticed everything in it that might be of interest in the study of Milton's character. There is, for example, one very curious passage in which Milton, in reply to a criticism of Morus, defends his use of very gross words (verba nuda et prætextata) in speaking of very gross things. He makes two daring quotations, one from Piso's Annals and the other from Sallust, to show that he had good precedent; and he cites Herodotus, Seneca, Suetonius, Plutarch, Erasmus, Thomas More, Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, Lactantlas, Eusebius, and the Bible itself, as examples occasionally of the very reverse of a squeamish euphemism. Of even greater interest is a passage in which he foresees the charges of cruelty, ruthlessness, and breach of literary etiquette, likely to be brought against him on account of his treatment of Morus, and expounds his theory on that subject. The passage may fitly conclude our account of the Pro Se Defensio:—

"To defame the bad and to praise the good, the one on the principle of severe punishment and the other on that of high reward, are equally just, and make up together almost the sum of justice; and we see in fact that the two are of nearly equal efficacy for the right management of life. The two things, in short, are so interrelated, and so involved in one and the same act, that the vituperation of the bad may in a sense be called the praising of the good. But, though right, reason, and use are equal on both sides, the acceptability is not the same likewise; for whoever vituperates another bears the burden and imputation of two very heavy things at once,—accusing another, and thinking well of himself. Accordingly, all are ready enough with praise, good and bad alike, and the objects of their praise worthy and unworthy together; but no one either dares or is able to accuse freely and intrepidly but the man of integrity alone. Accustomed in our youth, under so many masters, to make laborious displays of imaginary eloquence, and taught to think that the demonstrative force of the same lies no less in invective than in praise, we certainly do at the desk hack to pieces bravely the traditional tyrants of antiquity. Mezentius, if such is the chance, we slay over again with unsavoury antitheta; or we roast to perfection Phalaris of Agrigentum, as in his own bull, with lamentable bellowing of enthymemes. In the debating room or lecture-room, I mean; for in the State for the most part we rather adore and worship such, and call them most powerful, most great, most august. The proper thing would be either not to have spent our first years in sport as imaginary declaimers, or else, when our country or the State needs, to leave our mere fencing-foils, and venture sometimes into the sun, and dust, and field of battle, to exert real brawn, shake real arms, seek a real foe. The Suffeni and Sophists of the past, on the one hand, the Pharisees and Simons and Hymenæi and Alexanders of the past on the other, we go at with many a weapon: those of the present day, and come to life again in the Church, we praise with studied eulogies, we honour with professorships, and stipends, and chairs, the incomparable men that they are, the highly-learned and saintly. If it comes to the censuring of one of them, if the mask and specious skin of one of them are dragged off, if he is shown to be base within, or even publicly and openly criminal, there are some who, for what purpose or through what timidity I know not, would have him publicly defended by testimonies in his favour rather than marked with due animadversion. My principle, I confess, and as the fact has several times proved, is far enough apart from theirs, inasmuch as, if I have made any profit when young in the literary leisure I then had, whether by the instructions of learned men or by my own lucubrations, I would employ the whole of it to the advantage of life and of the human race, could I range so far, to the utmost of my weak ability. And, if sometimes even out of private enmities public delinquencies come to be exposed and corrected, and I have now, impelled by all possible reasons, prosecuted with most just invective, nor yet without proper result, not an adversary of my own merely, but one who is the common adversary of almost all, a nefarious man, a disgrace to the Reformed Religion and to the sacred order especially, a dishonour to learning, a most pernicious teacher of youth, an unclean ecclesiastic, it will be seen, I hope, by those who are chiefly interested in making an example of him (for why should I not so trust?), that herein I have performed an action neither displeasing to God, nor unwholesome to the Church, nor unuseful to the State."