Having been in Italy, he was taxed with Italian vices: he would have been accused of cannibalism had his path lain towards the Caribee Islands.

A fulsome dedication to Salmasius tended to fix the suspicion of authorship upon Alexander Morus, a Frenchman of Scotch extraction, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, and pastor of the Walloon Church, then an inmate of Salmasius's house, who actually had written the dedication and corrected the proof.

The real author, however, was Peter Du Moulin, ex-rector of Wheldrake, in Yorkshire.

The dedicatory ink was hardly dry ere Morus was involved in a desperate quarrel with Salmasius through the latter's imperious wife, who accused Morus of having been over-attentive to her English waiting-maid, whose patronymic is lost to history under the Latinized form of Bontia.
Failing to make Morus marry the damsel, she sought to deprive him of his ecclesiastical and professorial dignities.

The correspondence of Heinsius and Vossius shows what intense amusement the affair occasioned to such among the scholars of the period as were unkindly affected towards Salmasius.