is settlement at Oxford, near his brother Dr. Lewis, dates
itself, as I calculate, about 1654; and it must have been chiefly
thence, accordingly, that he had watched Milton's misdirected
attentions to poor Morus, knowing himself to be "the actual turbot."
There is proof, however, as we shall find, that he was, from that
date onwards, a good deal in London, and, what is almost startlingly
strange, in a select family society there which must have brought him
into relations with Milton, and perhaps now and then into his
company. Du Moulin could believe in 1670 that Milton even then knew
his secret, and that he owed his escape to Milton's pride and
unwillingness to retract his blunder about Morus. We have seen reason
to doubt that; and, indeed, Milton, had, in his second Morus
publication, put himself substantially right with the public about
the extent of Morus's concern in the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_,
and had scarcely anything to retract. What he could do in addition
was Du Moulin's danger. He could drag a new culprit to light and
immolate a second victim. That he refrained may have been owing, as
we have supposed most likely, to his continued ignorance that the Dr.
Du Moulin now going about in Oxford and in London, so near himself,
was the original and principal culprit; or, if he did have any
suspicions of the fact, there may have been other reasons, in and
after 1655, for a dignified silence.

[Footnote 1: Wood's Fasti, II. 195.]

In proceeding from the month of August 1655, when Milton published
his _Pro Se Defensio_, to his life through the rest of Oliver's
Protectorate, it is as if we were leaving a cluster of large islands
that had detained us long by their size and by the storms on their
coasts, and were sailing on into a tract of calmer sea, where the
islands, though numerous, are but specks in comparison. The reason of
this is that we are now out of the main entanglement of the Salmasius
and Morus controversy. Milton had taken leave of that subject, and
indeed of controversy altogether for a good while.

In the original memoirs of Milton due note is taken of this calm in
his life after his second castigation of Morus. "Being now quiet from
state adversaries and public contests," says Phillips, "he had
leisure again for his own studies and private designs"; and Wood's
phrase is all but identical: "About the time that he had finished
these things, he had more leisure and time at command." Both add
that, in th