for this labor, whilst they do not fail to record the "fitt reward" which the Council awarded to John Durie for translating the work into French. And we have the fact that he was permitted to make the writing of this book suit his own convenience, "beginning it late, and finishing it leisurely in the midst of other employments and diversions"a favor which, as Mr. Todd justly reasons, would hardly, in the case of a work, the early appearance of which was of importance, have been conceded to a mere hireling scribe.

The "Iconoclastes" appeared in the closing part of the year 1649. The same period witnessed the publication of a work which was destined to involve Milton in the most protracted and the most violent controversy in which he ever embarked. This was the "Defensio Regia pro Carolo I.," by Claude Saumaise, better known as Salmasius.

Charles II. was at this time residing at the Hague, "living with and upon the Prince of Orange," as Clarendon tells us; poor enough and dispirited enough, yet inclined to make an effort or two more to regain the splendid patrimony from which he had been driven. The impression which had been produced in England by the publication of the "Icon Basilike probably suggested the idea of following it up by a still more energetic attack upon the Commonwealth party. The poor king had one hundred Jacobusses in his purse, and these he resolved to sacrifice in order to procure such a publication. A ready instrument was found in Salmasius, then one of the Professors at Leyden, and who enjoyed the reputation of being one of the most learned men of his age. He was unquestionably a man of abilities. His memory was prodigious; his reading was unbounded; and his ingenuity considerable. His linguistic attainments and his philological writings still command respect; in his own day he was deemed such a prodigy, that people were wont to say that what Salmasius did not know was not knowable. But there were many things he did not know, and many literary qualifications he did not possess; and these, unhappily for him, were the very things and the very qualifications especially requisite for the work to which the exiled prince summoned him. He was ignorant of political science and the principles of social ethics. He was ignorant of

*Preface to the Iconoclastes.

the English constitution, the English history, and the temper of the English people. Worst of all, he was ignorant of his own ignorance, and addressed himself to his task with all the confidence and self-sufficiency which learned ignorance is apt to assume. His temper also was bad; he was overbearing and insolent; and he indulged to its full extent in that license of vituperation which the scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to have regarded as their peculiar privilege; judging, apparently, that there was no excess of Scommatism to which a writer might not resort, provided always he kept the peace with Priscian, and clothed his anger in Ciceronian Latin. In his scholarship, moreover, there was all that painful attention to trifles, that "insanum minutiarum studium," which Ruhnken tells us is peculiar to otiose litterateurs.* His mind had nothing great in it, nothing comprehensive, nothing original. He was a successful scholar, and nothing more. What Pope has most unjustly put into the mouth of Richard Bentley, was to the letter true of Salmasius:

is himself judged of no one." This high doctrine he proceeds, by an immense farrago of authorities, to defend as the doctrine held in all ages and by all peoples. "So of old judged the whole East, so the West. In the regions of the North and the South, wherever kings reigned, their subjects had no other opinion, no other custom. Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Romans, Jews, Greeks, Pagans, Christians, thought thus." All this is shown at great length, and with an immense parade of learning. It is not till we reach the eighth chapter, that we find the author preparing to deal with the only really important question in this department of his inquiry viz., what was the opinion, what the custom of the people of England respecting kings? Here, having neither Talmuds nor classics to quote from, he is sadly puzzled to keep up appearances; still he makes a manful effort, and by help of William of Malmesbury, Matthew of Paris, Gervasius, &c., illustrated here and there by Aristotle, Tacitus, Mela, Juvenal, and others of the ancients, he manages very respectably to fill up a goodly number of pages. In the concluding chapters (x.-xii.) he discusses the character and proceedings of the party by whom the king had been beheaded, and defends the character and conduct of Charles. This is by much the ablest part of his work; it is written with less stiffness and much greater vigor than the preceding parts; and when one compares its animated eloquence and hearty vituperation with the dreary pedantry of the earlier chapters, it is hard to resist the suspicion that some such pen as that of Hyde was at work, and that Salmasius had no other hand in this part of the "Defensio than that of translating into Latin the thoughts and words of a greatly more vigorous mind than

his own.

The publication of this work appears to have produced no great sensation either on the Continent or in England. This is not surprising. Few except unoccupied scholars were likely to toil through its heavy pages; and whilst its main purpose possessed only a secondary interest to the continental nations, its fundamental thesis was one which few Englishmen of any party then in England were prepared to adopt. Those theories of government on which the Divine right of kings is based, were unknown in this country before the days of Laud, and when propounded, they had received little welcome

* Def. Reg. c. 2, sub init.

even from those who afterward periled all in their efforts to support the throne. On the great mass of the people they never made any impression. Among them it had, ever since England was England, been held as a settled thing, that there was a point beyond which no prince could urge his prerogative and no freeborn people could submit; and their history presented to them too many instances in which the haughtiest of their sovereigns had been compelled to respect the popular will, and too many instances in which the reigning dynasty had been changed by force of domestic arms, for them to be very overwhelmingly impressed with a sense of "the divinity that doth hedge about a king." Had Salmasius been more modest-had he assumed lower ground

had he followed up the impression produced by the "Icon Basilike," by, like it, dwelling rather on the personal merits and sufferings of the late king, than by mooting great political and constitutional questions, in which he assumed positions to which few good and no thoughtful men could assent, he would better have served the cause of his employer, and if not in quantity, certainly in quality, rendered a fairer equivalent for his hundred Jacobusses. As it was, he, like many a hired pleader, both before and since, spoiled his cause by overdoing it.

But though the work of Salmasius created no remarkable sensation, it yet contained enough to render it desirable that it should not be left unanswered. Milton was accordingly enjoined, by an order in Council, of the date January 8th, 1849-50, to "prepare something in answer to the booke of Salmasius, and when he hath done itt, bring itt to the Councell." His answer was ready by the close of the year, and on the 23d of December, 1650, it was "ordered that Mr. Milton doe print the treatise which he hath written, in answer to a late booke written by Salmasius against the proceedings of this Commonwealth." The work appeared in the early part of the following year, under the title "Joannis Miltoni Angli pro Populo Anglicano Defensio contra Claudii Anonymi, alias Salmasii Defensionem Regiam."

On this production Milton put forth all his strength. He seems to have entered upon it with the design not merely of defending the Commonwealth, but of crushing the presumptuous pedant by whom it had been assailed. For Salmasius he evidently felt no respect, and to him he shows no pity. With a learning equal at least to his

own, and an energy far beyond any he ever | possessed, Milton follows him step by step through his book, and does battle with him for every inch of the ground. No weapon of defence or assault that could be pressed into his service does he refuse. Quotations, criticism, sarcasm, puns, nicknames, vituperation, mingle with the acutest reasoning and the loftiest eloquence, in the strange tissue of his Discourse. From gravely discussing a question in history or political science, he suddenly passes to some stern joke upon his antagonist, or some vehement philippic upon the cause he had set himself to advocate. Now he weighs some dictum of Aristotle, or expounds some passage in the Bible, and then he darts away to pounce upon some unlucky solecism in his opponent's Latinity, or to make himself merry over his opponent's domestic thraldom. In reading this treatise, one cannot help thinking of the grim hilarity of the cat, as she tosses and plays with the mouse, which ever and anon she wounds with her talons, and at last utterly devours.

Hobbes is said to have remarked of the two "Defences," that he knew not which contained the best Latin or the worst logic. But there can be no candid and competent judge of either who will hesitate to assign the palm in both to Milton. Such certainly was the verdict of the best judges in his own day. As soon as his work appeared, it was circulated all over the Continent, and everywhere commanded the highest eulogies for its splendid diction, its acute and vigorous reasoning, and its immeasurable superiority to the work in reply to which it was issued. Congratulations poured in upon the author from all quarters; the ambassadors of foreign courts then resident in London paid him formal visits of compliment; and letters from the most distinguished scholars of Europe, expressive of their admiration of his production, were continually reaching him. His book was translated into Dutch, and apparently also into French. Certain it is that it was burnt in France, first at Paris and then at Toulouse; an evidence that it was both hated and feared in that country. Even royalty itself, in the person of Christina of Sweden, perused it with admiration, and gave unmistakeable evidence of approbation by dismissing, if not with indignity, at least without honor, Salmasius from the court. Beyond this general applause, however, the author had no remuneration for his labor, except the thanks of the Council and the gratitude of the best part of his countrymen.

Toland, indeed, has asserted that he received a present of £1000 from the Council. But this is a mistake, as Milton's own assertion in his "Second Defence," and the books of the Council attest.

It is not to be denied that the "Defence of the People of England against Salmasius" is disfigured by many and grievous faults. It must be admitted that it is needlessly prolix, and that much on which its author elaborately dwells is altogether irrelevant to the main question at issue between him and his antagonist. It must be admitted that his retaliation often exceeds the bounds of severity and becomes fierce and truculent. It must be admitted that many of his attempts at wit are miserably abortive, that his puns are, for the most part, about the worst ever perpetrated, and that he is often indelicate and coarse in his sarcasms and allusions. It must be admitted that many of his criticisms are hypercritical, that what he triumphantly holds up to scorn as the barbarisms and blunders in grammar of his antagonist, are not always such; and that sometimes his own pen drops solecisms as gross and unpardonable as any of which he accuses Salmasius.* But whilst all this is

A famous instance of this occurs in Milton's

merciless taunting of Salmasius for saying that the English had committed parricide in persona regisin the person of the king. "What is this," exunless, indeed, you refer to some pretender who, claims Milton-"what Latinity ever spoke thus ! putting on the mask of the king, perpetrated 1 know not what parricide among the English," &c. Milton here evidently assumes that persona is never used by Latin writers in the sense in which we use but always retains its primary meaning of mask, or "person" when we say, "the person of the king;" personation. But this is a mistake. Johnson cites a passage from Juvenal, Sat. iv., v. 14, which clearly establishes the usage; unless, indeed, persona there means "character" in the sense in

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which we speak of a man being a "bad character." But a better authority than Juvenal, no less than Cicero, is indubitably on the side of Salmasius here In one passage, indeed, he uses the very formula employed by Salmasius; speaking of Caesar's confecit asperius."-Epist. ad Fam. By the side of this, duct to Pompey, he says, "in ejus persona multa Salmasius's "parracidium in persona regis" may stand without blushing. Whilst thus over-zealous to find fault with his adversary, Milton falls into a blunder himself. "I will leave you," says he, "to quibus ego tu deridendum et vapulandum propino the tender mercies of your own grammaticists; to whom I propose you to be laughed at and whipped." Milton had probably Terence's expression, "Ego hunc comedendum et deridenwhen he wrote this; but in substituting a word for dum vobis propino," (Eunuch, v. 9, 47) in his mind "comedendum," he unfortunately used one which has no existence! This verb "vapulo" signifying