I., the guilt of the Jews in crucifying Christ was as nothing."
Exaggerated praises of Salmasius were followed by scurrilous and rabid
abuse of Milton. In the style of the most shameless Jesuit lampoon,
the _Amphitheatrum_ or the _Scaliger hypobolimaeus_, and with Jesuit
tactics, every odious crime is imputed to the object of the satire,
without regard to truth or probability. Exiles are proverbially
credulous, and it is likely enough that the gossip of the English
refugees at the Hague was much employed in improving or inventing
stories about the man, who had dared to answer the royalist champion
in Latin as good as his own. Salmasius in his _Defensio_ had employed
these stories, distorting the events of Milton's life to discredit
him. But for the author of the _Clamor_ there was no such excuse, for
the book was composed in England, by an author living in Oxford and
London, who had every opportunity for informing himself accurately of
the facts about Milton's life and conversation. He chose rather to
heap up at random the traditional vocabulary of defamation, which the
Catholic theologians had employed for some generations past, as their
best weapon against their adversaries. In these infamous productions,
hatched by celibate pedants in the foul atmosphere of the Jesuit
colleges, the gamut of charges always ranges from bad grammar to
unnatural crime. The only circumstance which can be alleged in
mitigation of the excesses of the _Regii sanguinis clamor_ is that
Milton had provoked the onfall by his own violence. He who throws dirt
must expect that dirt will be thrown back at him, and when it comes to
mud-throwing, the blackguard has, as it is right that he should have,
the best of it.

The author of the _Clamor_ was Peter Du Moulin, a son of the
celebrated French Calvinist preacher of the same name. The author not
daring to entrust his pamphlet to an English press, had sent it over