The attestations of his life at Amsterdam and at the Hague, he could not get them to his fancy" (Thurloe, 11.708).] While we have thus given, with tolerable completeness, an abstract of Milton's extraordinary _Pro Se Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum_, we have by no means noticed everything in it that might be of interest in the study of Milton's character.

There is, for example, one very curious passage in which Milton, in reply to a criticism of Morus, defends his use of very gross words (_verba nuda et praetextata_) in speaking of very gross things.

He makes two daring quotations, one from Piso's Annals and the other from Sallust, to show that he had good precedent; and he cites Herodotus, Seneca, Suetonius, Plutarch, Erasmus, Thomas More, Clement of Alexandria, Arnobius, Lactantlas, Eusebius, and the Bible itself, as examples occasionally of the very reverse of a squeamish euphemism.
Of even greater interest is a passage in which he foresees the charges of cruelty, ruthlessness, and breach of literary etiquette, likely to be brought against him on account of his treatment of Morus, and expounds his theory on that subject.

The passage may fitly conclude our account of the _Pro Se Defensio_:-- "To defame the bad and to praise the good, the one on the principle of severe punishment and the other on that of high reward, are equally just, and make up together almost the sum of justice; and we see in fact that the two are of nearly equal efficacy for the right management of life.

The two things, in short, are so interrelated, and so involved in one and the same act, that the vituperation of the bad may in a sense be called the praising of the good.