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bers,' 'Ruffians,' 'Parricides,' and 'Fanatics,' and that you have not-under the impulse of ambition or a wish to plunder, not incited by sedition or by depraved passions, not in a paroxysm of folly or phrenzy-murdered a king; but that, elevated and kindled with the love of liberty, of religion, of equity, of honor, and of your country, you have inflicted punishment upon a tyrant.

"If however, which God avert, your projects and purposes be different; if, notwithstanding your signal experience of a Deity so propitious to yourselves and so destructive to your foes; after all your bravery in war, you are resolved to be corrupt in peace, and unaffected by the memorable and awful example before your eyes, you disdain 'to learn to do justice, and to walk humbly with your God,' for my part, I must indeed be constrained reluctantly to acknowledge the truth of all these infamous charges against you, which are now uttered or conceived by the slanderers of your fame; and you will but too quickly feel the wrath of the Almighty in a much more powerful degree than it has ever visited your ene

mies, or than you yourselves have ever experienced, beyond the other nations of modern times, his kind, indulgent, and paternal love."*

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'This great display of intellectual power was received with the plaudit of the world; and as the author's name was not in any wide celebrity out of his own country, the general surprise was nearly equal to the general admiration: Congratulations and acknowledgments of respect poured in upon him from every quarter, and the scholars of Europe, actuated by a similar spirit with the spectators of the old Olympic games, threw garlands on the conqueror of Salmasius. On the publication of the 'Defence of the People of England,' all the ambassadors in London, of whom perhaps the greater number were from crowned heads, discovered their sense of its merit by complimenting or visiting its author; and he was gratified by letters, replete with praise and with professions of esteem, from foreigners eminent for their talents and erudition."+

As for Salmasius, already broken in health,

* Prose Works, Vol. V., p. 194. † Symmons' Life, pp. 322, 323.

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smote by the "thunder-clasping hand" of the mighty Englishman, and having in his intellectual armory no polemical weapons with which to parry the blow, he quitted Leyden bitterly chagrined, and repairing to the mineral waters of Spa for seclusion and relief, shortly after died there.

No more terrible and utter demolition was ever given an opponent than Milton's crucifying exposé. He might say, with stout and somewhat cynical old Wither,"

*

"I stript abuse from all her colors quite,
And laid her ugly face to open sight."

And again:

"I have my pen so point that, where it traces,
Each accent doth draw blood into their faces."

Yet he is never exactly vindictive, but knows how to be "harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice" when defending against hireling assaults and despotic precepts the majestic tenets of civil and religious liberty.

* John Wither, a noted Puritan poet and satirist of that age; born in 1588, and sometime a major-general in the Parliamentary army under Cromwell.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE hearty applause with which the "Defence of the English People" was greeted by continental thinkers, was doubly echoed by Milton's own grateful and appreciative countrymen. The Council of State voted him a donation of a thousand pounds from the public treasury, as a testimonial of their sense of his service to the Commonwealth.* He had besides the gratification to perceive that, while the libel of Salmasius "lingered on the venders' shelves, or crept languidly through a very confined circulation," his own immortal work passed rapidly through several editions, and made him, as Bayle tells us, the conversation of the world. Nor did the distinction which the "Defence" enjoyed of being publicly burned by the common hangman in the squares of Paris and Toulouse tend to decrease the demand for it, or to lessen the fame of its great writer.

*Toland. Symmons, p. 335.

It was at this time, when Milton was at the zenith of his contemporary fame, that the celebrated Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, the faithful friend of religious toleration, and the dauntless defender of civil and ecclesiastical liberty, dispatched by his loving disciples at home on a mission to England, contracted that intimate friendship with the Latin Secretary of the Council and with the younger Vane, the influence of which has been so beneficent to either continent.

Roger Williams reached London some time in 1651. Taking a house in the immediate vicinity of the respective residences of Milton and Vane, his mission brought him to their speedy notice; while his republican sentiments, his religious fervor, his profound scholarship, and his tolerant principles soon secured their respect, which feeling ere long ripened into the most intimate friendship. Domesticated in England for some years-he did not return to America until 1654-Roger Williams eked out his slender income by receiving, after Milton's fashion, a number of pupils. During this time the close familiarity in which he lived with

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