The exigencies of controversy revealed in Milton not only an inexhaustible store of coarse invective, but also, at times, the flash of real wit. "My fate," he says, with some sense of the incongruity of the thing, "extorts from me a talent of sport, which I had thought to hide in a napkin." We are privileged to hear Milton laugh. It is not mirthful nor gentle laughter, but rather the fierce, harsh, vehement laughter of the Hebrew Psalms, the laughter of scorn, the shooting out of the lips, the saying "Ha, ha." He speaks with his mouth, and swords are in his lips. Thus, of Alexander Morus, Professor of Sacred History at Amsterdam, whom he suspected to be the author of a tract in support of Salmasius, he says: "There is one More, part Frenchman and part Scot, so that one country or one people cannot be quite overwhelmed with the whole infamy of his extraction"; and he indulges himself in a debauch of punning on _Morus_, the Latin word for a mulberry. In the prelatical controversy, after discussing with his opponent the meaning of the word "angel," he continues: "It is not ordination nor jurisdiction that is angelical, but the heavenly message of the Gospel, which is the office of all ministers alike.... And if you will contend still for a superiority in one person, you must ground it better than from this metaphor, which you may now deplore as the axe-head that fell into the water, and say, 'Alas, master! for it was borrowed'; unless you have as good a faculty to make iron swim, as you had to make light froth sink." In the _Apology_ for Smectymnuus he heaps one grotesque comparison on another. His adversary, the son of Bishop Hall, is like "some empiric of false accusations to try his poisons upon me, whether they would work or not." The learning that was displayed by the champion of Episcopacy and the very typographical arrangement of his book incur an equal contempt: the margin of his treatise "is the sluice most commonly that feeds the drought of his text.... Nor yet content with the wonted room of his margin, but he must cut out large docks and creeks into his text, to unlade the foolish frigate of his unseasonable authorities." His best folios "are predestined to no better end than to make winding-sheets in Lent for pilchers." With this last stroke Milton is so well pleased that he repeats the same prediction in an elaborated form over the works of Salmasius, and even celebrates in numerous verse the forethought and bounty of one who has thus taken pity on the nakedness of fishes.