nd specious skin of one of them are dragged off, if he is shown to
be base within, or even publicly and openly criminal, there are
some who, for what purpose or through what timidity I know not,
would have him publicly defended by testimonies in his favour
rather than marked with due animadversion. My principle, I confess,
and as the fact has several times proved, is far enough apart from
theirs, inasmuch as, if I have made any profit when young in the
literary leisure I then had, whether by the instructions of learned
men or by my own lucubrations, I would employ the whole of it to
the advantage of life and of the human race, could I range so far,
to the utmost of my weak ability. And, if sometimes even out of
private enmities public delinquencies come to be exposed and
corrected, and I have now, impelled by all possible reasons,
prosecuted with most just invective, nor yet without proper result,
not an adversary of my own merely, but one who is the common
adversary of almost all, a nefarious man, a disgrace to the
Reformed Religion and to the sacred order especially, a dishonour
to learning, a most pernicious teacher of youth, an unclean
ecclesiastic, it will be seen, I hope, by those who are chiefly
interested in making an example of him (for why should I not so
trust?), that herein I have performed an action neither displeasing
to God, nor unwholesome to the Church, nor unuseful to the State."

What a blast this to pursue poor Morus over the Continent! It would
seem as if, in expectation of it, he had put himself as far as he
could out of hearing. When Milton's _Pro Se Defensio_ appeared,
Morus was no longer in France, but in Italy; and it was not till May,
1656, or nine months after, that he reappeared in Holland. Then, as
he had outrun by more than a year his formal leave of absence from
his Amsterdam professorship, granted Dec, 20, 1654, there seem to
have been strict inquiries as to the causes of his long absence. It
was explained that he had fallen ill at Florence; it also came out
that he had had a very distinguished reception from the Grand Duke of
Tuscany, and that the Venetian Senate had presented him with a chain
of gold for a Latin poem he had written on a recent defeat of the
Turks at sea by the Venetian navy; and, what was most to the point,
it appeared, by addresses of his own at Amsterdam, and at a meeting
of the Walloon Synod at Leyden, that he had found in I