Restoration, when all interest had died out of the controversy. If it
be true that the work was written at Spa, without books at hand, it
is certainly a miraculous effort of memory. It does no credit to
Salmasius. He had raked together, after the example of Scioppius
against Scaliger, all the tittle-tattle which the English exiles had
to retail about Milton and his antecedents. Bramhall, who bore Milton
a special grudge, was the channel of some of this scandal, and
Bramhall's source was possibly Chappell, the tutor with whom Milton
had had the early misunderstanding. (See above p. 6). If any one
thinks that classical studies of themselves cultivate the taste and
the sentiments, let him look into Salmasius's _Responsio_. There he
will see the first scholar of his age not thinking it unbecoming to
taunt Milton with his blindness, in such language as this: "a puppy,
once my pretty little man, now blear-eyed, or rather a blindling;
having never had any mental vision, he has now lost his bodily sight;
a silly coxcomb, fancying himself a beauty; an unclean beast, with
nothing more human about him than his guttering eyelids; the fittest
doom for him would be to hang him on the highest gallows, and set his
head on the Tower of London." These are some of the incivilities, not
by any means the most revolting, but such as I dare reproduce, of this
literary warfare.

Salmasius's taunt about Milton's venal pen is no less false than his
other gibes. The places of those who served the Commonwealth, were
places of "hard work and short rations." Milton never received for his
_Defensio_ a sixpence beyond his official salary. It has indeed been
asserted that he was paid 1000 l.. for it by order of Parliament,
and this falsehood having been adopted by Johnson--himself a
pensioner--has passed into all the biographies, and will no doubt
continue to be repeated to the end of time. This is a just nemesis