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cannot surely be regarded as improbable that the pains arising from such a cause should, in their intensity, be injurious to health and accelerate the crisis of dissolution. Let this however, be decided according to the reader's fancy; Salmasius retired from the court of Stockholm in september 1651, and died · at Spa in Germany, in the following september, when he had just completed a most virulent reply to sting if he could not mortally wound his successful adversary. But this last effort of the great Salmasius's pen, which was published, with happy malignity, in the year of the restoration and dedicated by his son to Charles II, was of a character to hurt only the memory of its author. On the devoted head of Milton, it accumulated every crime which can debase our poor nature, and every opprobrious epithet which the most copious vocabulary could supply on the torturing requisition of curious and zealous rancour. As I am not possessed of this paltry work of an eminent man and have not been able to obtain it, I am compelled to rest my report of it on the testimony of Vossius, who saw it

Of the gout, to which he bad been subject, as his biographer Clement assures us: but few complaints are more exasperated by the disorders of the mind than the gout.

in manuscript; of Bayle; and of Dr. Birch. From the last of these writers, I shall insert a further account of it in a note.

The publication of this reply to Milton, which was delayed, as we have noticed, for some years,was preceded by that of two others, produced with different degrees of power, but equally envenomed and aimed equally at the heart. The earliest of these replies, the barbarous and solecistic style of which will not allow us to impute it, with Milton,

• His reply to Milton did not appear till the year of the restoration, when it was printed at London in 24to, under the fol lowing title; "Claudii Salmasiį ad Joannem Miltonum Responsio, Opus posthumum," with a dedication to king Charles II, by Salmasius's Son Claudius, dated at Dijon, sept. 1, 1660. This Book is written with unexampled virulence. He treats Milton as an ordinary schoolmaster; "Qui Ludimagister in scholâ triviali Londinensi fuit;" and charges him with divorc ing his wife after a year's marriage, for reasons best known to himself, and defending the lawfulness of divorce for any causes whatsoever. He stiles him "impura bellua, quæ nihil hominis sibi reliqui fecit præter lippientes oculos;" and charges him with some false quantities in his latin juvenile poems; and throughout the whole book gives him the titles of Bellua, fanaticus latro, Homunculus, Lippulus, Cæculus, Homo perditissinus, Nebulo impurus, scelestus audax & nefarius Alastor, infandus Impostor, &c. and declares, that he would have him tortured with burning pitch or scalding oil till he expired: " Pro cæteris autem tuis factis dictisque dignum dicam videri, qui pice ardenti, vel oleo fervente perfundaris, usque dum animam effles nocentem et carnifici jam pridem debitam." Account of Life and Writ ings of Milton, p. xxxvi.

d

to Bishop Bramhall, appeared in 1651 with the strange title of "Apologia pro Rege et Populo Anglicano contra Johannis Polypragmatici (alias Miltoni Angli) Defensionem de- · structivam, &c.—and the second, written by Peter du Moulin, (the son of an obscure French satirist of Sedan, but who subsequently obtained by his party merits a prebendal stall in Canterbury,) was published at the Hague, in 1652, and called, "Regii sanguinis clamor ad cœlum adversus parricidas Anglicanos." To the former of these works, which has been ascribed to a lawyer of Gray's Inn of the name of Jane and which was altogether a contemptible production, an answer was written by John Philips, Milton's eldest nephew, who had not then attained his twentieth year: against the latter Milton drew his own formidable pen; and

d I have been accustomed to translate the titles of the works which I have had occasion to notice: but the barbarity of this has puzzled me, and induced me, rather than deform my page with it in English, to depart from my usual practice. I may, however, give the version of it in this less conspicuous station. "An Apology for the King and the People of England against the pernicious Defence of the People of England, by John Busybody, (alias John Milton the Englishman.)" Polypragmaticus is a barbarous, and improperly compounded word, not acknowledged by any lexicographer. The title of Du Moulin's work is, "The Cry of the King's Blood to Heaven against the Engglish Parricides."

we shall soon have occasion to speak of the brilliant result.

Before we finally dismiss from ́our notice the "Defence of the People of England," it may be proper to mention that the curiosity respecting its author, which it generally excited, gave rise to a correspondence among the leading scholars of that age which supplies us with some valuable and interesting information. Isaac Vossius, who, after the restoration, was made one of the Canons of Windsor, being at the court of Stockholm when the " Defence" was published, relates the warm approbation which Christina expressed of Milton's work, and unites his own applauses with those of the Queen. Francis Junius, the writer of " De Picturâ Veterum," a learned treatise on the painting of the ancients, and who was intimate with our author, speaks in the most favourable terms of the extent of his literary acquisitions, of his unblemished morals, of his mild and pleasing manners. Nicholas Heinsius, who then resided at Venice, bears testimony, from information collected on the spot, to the purity (the Italians called it austerity) of Milton's conduct during his visit to Italy, and rescues him, in this instance, from the slanders of Salmasius. N. Hein

sius also professes his admiration of the "Defence of the People of England," but speaks with disrespect of the writer's latin poetry, as greatly inferior in merit to his prose composition, and as censurable for its frequent offences against quantity. On the subject of this charge we have already had occasion to remark; and it may now be necessary only to observe that, with exception to the scazons addressed to Salsilli and the ode to Rouse, in both of which pieces the poet may be regarded as guilty rather of new and unwarrantable fabrics of verse than of violations of quantity, the accusation seems to rest upon a very slight, if upon any foundation.

As the "Iconoclastes" and the " Defence of the People of England" were composed between the closes of the years 1649 and 1651, they were, of course, completed before the author's removal to Petty-France, which did not take place till the beginning of 1652. On the second of may, in this year, his family was increased by the birth of his fourth child, Deborah; and, the mother dying in childbed, he was left, with three orphan daughters, in domestic solitude, and in a state rapidly advancing to blindness. The prediction of his

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