His diatribes against woman suggest a touch of madness, and he was in fact at one time seized with an attack of insanity.
His last days were harassed by the diatribes of the Puritan preacher, Francis Cheynell.
The poems were most frequently works of art, occasionally they were tracts; but the prose was almost exclusively concerned with the public men and questions of the day, and forms a series of incisive, witty and sometimes prophetic diatribes.
Today one has only to go to Russia, eastern Europe or the Arab countries to hear the same anti-semitic diatribes.
On the whole, however, bloodcurdling diatribes are better studied in the hours of darkness than in the morning.
