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 hæc 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. Who was the real author of the book for which Morus had been so dreadfully punished, and what was the real amount of Morus's responsibility in it? That Milton's original belief on this subject had been shaken has been already evident. He had written his _Defensio Secunda_, in firm reliance on the universal report that Morus was the one proper author of the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_, or that it had been concocted between him and Salmasius; and, though Morus's denial of the authorship had been formally conveyed to him before the _Defensio Secunda_ left the press, he had let it go forth as it was, in the conviction that he was still not wrong in the main. The more express and reiterated denials of Morus in the _Fides Publica_, however, with the references there to another person as the real author, though Morus was not at liberty to divulge his name, had produced an effect. The authorship of the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_ was then indeed a secondary question, inasmuch as in the _Fides Publica_ Morus had interposed himself personally,--not only in self-defence, but also for counter-attack on Milton. Still, as the _Fides Publica_ would never have been written had not Milton assumed Morus to be the author of the _Regii Sanguinis Clamor_ and dragged him before the world solely on that account, Milton had necessarily, in replying to the _Fides Publica_, adverted to the secondary question. His assertion now, i.e, in the _Pro Se Defensio_, was a modified one. It was that, whatever facts had yet to be revealed respecting the authorship of the four or five parts of the compound book severally, he yet knew for certain that Morus had been the editor of the whole book, the corrector of the press for the whole, the busy and ostentatious agent in the circulation of early copies, and the writer at least of the