ost resolutely, and with a good deal of
scholarly painstaking. Milton, on the other hand, he thoroughly
dislikes, and represents as a most malicious and un-Christian man,
consciously untruthful, and of most lax theology to boot. To be sure,
he was the author of _Paradise Lost_; but that much-praised poem
had serious religious defects too! There is something actually
refreshing in the _naivete_ and courage with which the
sturdy Professor of the Associate Synod propounds his own dissent
from the common Milton-worship.--The authority for Morus's
acquaintanceship in Italy with Holstenius and Dati is the collection
of his Latin Poems, a thin quarto, published at Paris in 1669, under
the title of _Alexandri Mori Poemata_. It contains his poem, a
longish one in Hexameters, on the victory of the Venetians over the
Turks; also verses to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany; also obituary
elegiacs to Diodati of Geneva, and several pieces to or on Salmasius.
One piece, in elegiacs, is addressed "_Ad Franciscum Turretinum,
rarae indolis ac summae spei juvenem_." This Francis Turretin (so
addressed, I suppose, long ago, when he and Morus were in Geneva
together) was, if I mistake not, the famous Turretin of Milton's
letter about Morus to Ezekiel Spanheim (ante pp. 173-176). Among the
other pieces are one to Holstenius and one to Carlo Dati. In the
first Morus, speaking of his introduction to Holstenius and to the
Vatican library together, says he does not know which seemed to him
the greater library. The poem to Dati is of considerable length, in
Hexameters, and entitled "_AEgri Somnium: ad praestantem virum
Carolum Dati_" ("An Invalid's Dream: To the excellent Carlo
Dati"). It represents Morus as very ill in Florence and thinking
himself dying. Should he die in Florence and be buried there, he
would have a poetic inscription over his grave to the effect that
while alive he also had cultivated the Muses, and begging the
passer-by to remember his name ("_Qui legis haec obiter, Morique
morique memento_"). How kind Dati had been to him--Dati, "than
whom there is not a better man, the beloved of all the sister Muses,
the ornament of his country, having the reputation of being all but
unique in Florence for learning in the vanished arts, siren at once
in Tuscan, Latin, and Greek! ... This Dati soothed my fever-fits with
the music of his liquid singing, and sat by my bed-side, and spoke
words of sweetness, which inhere yet in my very marrow." And so