The faults in manners you lay to my charge are these: 1. _Self-conceit._ 2. _That I will be very angry with all men that do not presently submit to my dictates._ 3. _That I had my doctrine concerning Vision, out of papers which I had in my hands of Mr. Warner’s._ 4. _That I have injured the universities._ 5. _That I am an enemy to religion._ These are great faults; but such as I cannot yet confess. And therefore I must, as well as I can, seek out the grounds upon which you build your accusation. Which grounds (seeing you are not acquainted with my conversation) must be either in my published writings, or reported to you by honest men, and without suspicion of interest in reporting it. As for my self-conceit and ostentation, you shall find no such matter in my writings. That which you allege from thence is first, that in the epistle dedicatory I say of my book _De Corpore_, “_though it be little, yet it is full; and if good may go for great, great enough._” When a man presenting a gift great or small to his betters, adorneth it the best he can to make it the more acceptable; he that thinks this to be ostentation and self-conceit, is little versed in the common actions of human life. And in the same epistle, where I say of civil philosophy: “_It is no ancienter than my book De Cive_;” these words are added: “_I say it provoked, and that my detractors may see they lose their labour_.” But that which is truly said, and upon provocation, is not boasting, but defence. A short sum of that book of mine, now publicly in French, done by a gentleman I never saw, carrieth the title of _Ethics Demonstrated_ . The book itself translated into French, hath not only a great testimony from the translator Sorberius, but also from Gassendus, and Mersennus, who being both of the Roman religion had no cause to praise it, or the divines of England have no cause to find fault with it. Besides, you know that the doctrine therein contained is generally received by all but those of the clergy, who think their interest concerned in being made subordinate to the civil power; whose testimonies therefore are invalid. Why therefore, if I commend it also against them that dispraise it publicly, do you call it boasting? “_You have heard_,” you say, “_that I had promised the quadrature of the circle, &c._” You heard then that which was not true. I have been asked sometimes, by such as saw the figure before me, what I was doing, and I was not afraid to say I was seeking for the solution of that problem; but not that I had done it. And afterwards being asked of the success, I have said, I thought it done. This is not boasting; and yet it was enough, when told again, to make a fool believe it was boasting. But you, the astronomer, in the epistle before your philosophical essay, say “_You had a great expectation of my philosophical and mathematical works, before they were published_.” It may be so. Is that my fault? Can