MILTON'S OWN CHARACTER AND REPUTATION:--"Do not think, obscurely though you live, that, because you have had the first innings in this game in the art of slander, you therefore stand aloft beyond the reach of darts. You have not the ring of Gyges to make you invisible. Your virtues are taken note of. You are not such a person, my friend, that Fame should fear to tell lies even about _you_; and, unless Fame lies, there is not a meaner or more worthless man going, and nothing is clearer than that you estimate by your own morals the characters of other people. But I hope Fame lies in this. For who could hear without the greatest pain--what I for my part hardly, nay not to the extent of hardly, bring my mind to credit--that there is a man living among Christians who, being himself a concrete of every form of outrageous iniquity, could so censure others?" MILTON'S PRODIGIOUS SELF-ESTEEM:--"All which has so elated you that you would be reckoned next after the very first man in England, and sometimes put yourself higher than the supreme Cromwell himself; whom you name familiarly, without giving him any title of rank, whom you lecture under the guise of praising him, to whom you dictate laws, assign boundaries to his rights, prescribe duties, suggest counsels, and even hold out threats if he shall not behave accordingly. You grant him arms and rule; you claim genius and the gown for yourself. '_He only is to be called great_,' you say, '_who has either done great things_'--Cromwell, to wit!---'_or teaches great things_'--Milton on Divorce, to wit!--'_or writes of them worthily_'--the same twice-great Milton, I suppose, in his Defence of the English People!"