n the testimony of
Crantzius (for it is right that so great a contest should not begin
without quotation from your own _Fides Publica_)--you who, on
the testimony of Crantzius, were _altier_ in French, or
_fiercish_ in Latin, and on the testimony of Diodati had
_terrible spurs for self-defence_, prepare to do your manly
utmost in this feminine kind of fight. Madame de Saumaise stands by
as Juno, arbiter of the contest, Salmasius himself, lying in the
next room ill with the gout, when he heard the battle begun,
almost dies with laughing. But alas! and O fie! our unwarlike
Alexander, no match for his Amazon, falls down vanquished. She,
getting her man underneath, then first, from her position of
vantage, goes at his forehead, his eye-brows, his nose; with
wonderful arabesques, and in a Phrygian style of execution, she
runs her finger-points over the whole countenace of her prostrate
subject: never were you less pleased, Morus, with Pontia's lines
of beauty. At last, with difficulty, either margin of his cheeks
fully written on, but the chin not yet finished, up he rises, a
man, by your leave, absolutely nail-perfect, no mere Professor now
but a Pontifical Doctor,--for you might have inscribed upon him, as
on a painting, _Pontia fecit_. [We see now the reason for
keeping to the form 'Pontia.'] Doctor? Nay rather a codex in which
his vengeful critic had scraped her adverse comments with a new
stilus. You felt then, I think, Ulac's Tables of Tangents and
Secants, to a radius of I know not how many painful ciphers,
printed on your skin."

How does Milton meet Morus's protestations of his innocence both at
Geneva and in Leyden, and the evidence he adduces in his behalf?
Respecting the protestations, he notes that they are merely general
and that, like his denials of the authorship of the _Regii
Sanguinis Clamor_, they are worded equivocally or indistinctly.
Why does he not deny the Pelletta charge and the Bontia charge, and
the other charges, one by one specifically, and in a downright
manner? Why does he not go back to Geneva, face the living witnesses
and the documentary evidence there waiting him, and abide the issue?
As for the decisions in his favour in the Bontia case by the Walloon
Synod and the Supreme Court of Holland, of what worth are they? One
could see, one had even been informed, that there had been influences
at work with both tribunals to procure the result, s