he
heaps up personal scurrilities against his adversaries, and triumphs in
their misfortunes. There is nothing wherein our age more differs from his
than in the accepted rules governing controversy, and he has lost
estimation accordingly. Yet not a few critics, it may be suspected, have
allowed their dislike of the thing he says to hurry them into an
exaggerated censure on his manner of saying it. It is important, in the
first place, to remember that his violences are not the violences of the
hired rhetorician. He was prepared to stand by what he wrote, and he knew
the risks that he ran in those shifting and uncertain times. His life was
in danger at the Restoration, and was saved by some unknown piece of good
fortune or clemency. He was not a coward reviler, a "tongue-doughty
giant," whose ears are the most delicate part about him, but an open
fighter, who got as good as he gave. And then it is sometimes forgotten
that the most scurrilous of Milton's pamphlets were written in Latin, a
language which has always enjoyed an excellent liberty in the matter of
personal abuse; while even his English pamphlets, wherein at times he
shows almost as pretty a talent in reviling, were written for an audience
inured to the habitual amenities of Latin controversy. Sir Thomas More
was famous for his knack of calling bad names in good Latin, yet his
posterity rise up and call him blessed. Milton, like More, observed the
rules of the game, which allowed practices condemned in the modern
literary prize-ring. He calls Salmasius a poor grammarian, a pragmatical
coxcomb, a silly little scholar, a mercenary advocate, a loggerhead, a
hare-brained blunderbuss, a witless brawler, a mongrel cur; he reproaches
him with the domestic tyranny put upon him by that barking she-wolf, his
wife, and winds up with an elaborate comparison (not wholly unfamiliar to
modern methods of controversy) between Salmasius and Judas. With his
nameless opponent in the Divorce quarrel he deals--this time in
English--no less contemptuously: "I mean not to dispute philosophy with
this pork, who never read any." The creature is a conspicuous gull, an
odious fool, a dolt, an idiot, a groom, a rank pettifogger, a
presumptuous losel, a clown, a vice, a huckster-at-law, whose "jabberment
is the flashiest and the fustiest that ever corrupted in such an
unswilled hogshead." "What should a man say more to a snout in this
pickle? What language can be low and degenerate enough?" In