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 Milton's Italian friend of friends (Vol.III.pp.

551-654 and 680-683) had been charitable to poor Morus, whom he knew to be a fugitive from Milton's wrath, and who could name Milton, if at all, only with tears and cursing.] It is now high time, however, to answer a question which must have suggested itself again and again in the course of our narrative of the Milton and Morus controversy.