He exaggerates the foibles of Salmasius, his vanity,
and the vanity of Madame de Saumaise, her ascendancy over her husband,
his narrow pedantry, his ignorance of everything but grammar and
words. He exhausts the Latin vocabulary of abuse to pile up every
epithet of contumely and execration on the head of his adversary. It
but amounts to calling Salmasius fool and knave through a couple of
hundred pages, till the exaggeration of the style defeats the orator's
purpose, and we end by regarding the whole, not as a serious pleading,
but as an epideictic display. Hobbes said truly that the two books
were "like two declamations, for and against, made by one and the same
man as a rhetorical exercise" (_Behemoth_).
Milton's _Defensio_ was not calculated to advance the cause of the
Parliament, and there is no evidence that it produced any effect upon
the public, beyond that of raising Milton's personal credit. That
England, and Puritan England, where humane studies were swamped in a
biblical brawl, should produce a man who could write Latin as well
as Salmasius, was a great surprise to the learned world in Holland.
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