That, as he has told us, would have been his ruin.

The book, though shorter than the _Defensio Regia_ of Salmasius, was even a more impressive and successful vilification of the Commonwealth than that big performance; and not even to the son of the respected European theologian Molinaeus, and the brother of such a favourite of the Commonwealth as Dr.Lewis Du Moulin, could Parliament or the Council of State have shown mercy after such an offence.

As for Milton, the attack on whom ran through the more general invective, not for "forty thousand brothers" would _he_ have kept his hands off Dr.Peter had he known.

Providentially, however, Dr.Peter remained _incognito_, and it was Morus that was murdered, Dr.Peter looking on and "softly chuckling." Rather, I should say, getting more and more alarmed, and almost wishing that the book had never been written, or at all events praying more and more earnestly that he might not be found out, and that Morus, murdered irretrievably at any rate, would take his murdering quietly and hold his tongue.

For the Commonwealth had firmly established itself meanwhile, and had passed into the Protectorate; and all rational men in Europe had given up the cause of the Stuarts, and come to regard pamphlets in their behalf as so much waste paper; and was it not within the British Islands after all, ruled over though they were by Lord Protector Cromwell, that a poor French divine of talent, tied to England already by various connexions, had the best chances and outlooks for the future?
So, it appears, Du Moulin had reasoned with himself, and so he had acted.