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Updated: May 13, 2025
In Salmasius, Milton had at least been measuring his Latin against the Latin of the first classicist of the age. In Alexander Morus he wreaked august periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a graeculus esuriens, who appeared against Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the representative of the opposite principle.
He expends a wealth of vituperative Latin which makes us tremble, till we remember that it is put in motion to crush an insect. Morus met it by a supplementary Fides Publica, and Milton, resolved to have the last word, met him by a Supplement to the Defence. The reader will be glad to hear that this is the end of the Morus controversy.
The comedy is complete when we remember that Morus had not written the Clamor, nor Vlac the preface. Milton's rage blinded him; he is mad Ajax castigating innocent sheep instead of Achsaeans. The Latin pamphlets are indispensable to a knowledge of Milton's disposition.
This high-minded respect for another's secret is more to Morus' honour, than any of the petty gossip about him is to his discredit. He had nothing to offer, therefore, but negative assurances, and mere denial weighed nothing with Milton, who was fully convinced that Morus lied from terror. Milton's Defensio Secunda came out in May, 1654.
They are valuable for their wood, which produces a fine yellow dye, known by the name of `fustic-wood. The tree that produces the best of this dye is the Morus tinctoria, and grows in the West Indies and tropical America; but there is a species found in the southern United States, of an inferior kind, which produces the `bastard fustic' of commerce.
For about eighty years after this the flower continually increased in repute and became more and more known and cultivated, until the fantastic eagerness of the demand for fine ones and the great prices that they brought, resulted in a real mania like that about the morus multicaulis, or the petroleum mania of to-day, but much more intense.
The Morus multicaulis was imported, and the silk-manufacture with it; suddenly the trees seemed to grow bewildered, they put forth earlier and earlier in the spring, until they got back to January; the leaves at last fell so early that the worms died before spinning cocoons, and the whole enterprise was in a few years abandoned because of this vegetable insanity.
The effect of Milton's furious denunciation of Morus had been to damage his credit in religious circles, and to make mothers of families shy of allowing him to visit at their houses. Milton might have been content with a victory which, as Gibbon said of his own, "over such an antagonist was a sufficient humiliation." Milton's magnanimity was no match for his irritation.
"Let it be," said I; then taking off my hat I stood uncovered before the chair, and said in the best Welsh I could command, "Shade of Huw Morus, supposing your shade haunts the place which you loved so well when alive a Saxon, one of the seed of the Coiling Serpent, has come to this place to pay that respect to true genius, the Dawn Duw, which he is ever ready to pay.
Medicines indeed in general, which act with violence in a small dose, require the utmost skill to manage them with any tolerable degree of safety: to which may be added, that the various manners of making these kinds of preparations, as practised by different hands, must needs vary their power. MORUS nigra. MULBERRY. Fruit.
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