his narrow pedantry, his ignorance of everything but grammar and
words. He exhausts the Latin vocabulary of abuse to pile up every
epithet of contumely and execration on the head of his adversary. It
but amounts to calling Salmasius fool and knave through a couple of
hundred pages, till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's
purpose, and we end by regarding the whole, not as a serious pleading,
but as an epideictic display. Hobbes said truly that the two books
were "like two declamations, for and against, made by one and the same
man as a rhetorical exercise" (_Behemoth_).

Milton's _Defensio_ was not calculated to advance the cause of the
Parliament, and there is no evidence that it produced any effect upon
the public, beyond that of raising Milton's personal credit. That
England, and Puritan England, where humane studies were swamped in a
biblical brawl, should produce a man who could write Latin as well
as Salmasius, was a great surprise to the learned world in Holland.
Salmasius was unpopular at Leyden, and there was therefore a
predisposition to regard Milton's book with favour. Salmasius was
twenty years older than Milton, and in these literary digladiations
readers are always ready to side with a new writer. The contending
interests of the two great English parties, the wider issue between
republic and absolutism, the speculative inquiry into the right of
resistance, were lost sight of by the spectators of this literary
duel. The only question was whether Salmasius could beat the new
champion, or the new man beat Salmasius, at a match of vituperation.

Salmasius of course put in a rejoinder. His rapid pen found no
difficulty in turning off 300 pages of fluent Latin. It was his
last occupation. He died at Spa, where he was taking the waters, in
September, 1653, and his reply was not published till 1660, after the