His ungrateful country rewarded his virtues and services with exile, and would have extended her injustice to perpetual imprisonment or death, but for the courageous contrivance and self-devotion of his wife. Involved in the persecution of the Pensionary Barnevelt and the other Arminians, he was shut up in the fortress of Louvestein, in the year 1619. He was, however, allowed the society of his books, and of his accomplished and heroic wife, who contrived to deceive his guards, and induce them to carry him out in a chest, while she remained thus voluntarily exposed to the vengeance of his enemies. Grotius escaped into France, and in his banishment returned good for evil by rendering the most important services to his countrymen; and even his persecutor, Prince Maurice of Nassau, is treated with perfect fairness and impartiality in his Belgic history. In an age peculiarly infected with party animosity, Grotius preserved himself pure from the taint of bigotry;

Archbishop Laud immediately engaged the learned Selden to answer it, in a treatise entitled Mare Clausum, in which he not only maintained the national claim of sovereignty over the British seas, but the obnoxious claim of ship-money, which it was at that time the object of Charles I. and his councillors to establish.

and though actively engaged in the contention. between the religious factions of the Gomarists and Arminians, his expansive toleration embraced every sect, whether Catholic or Protestant; a degree of liberality almost unexampled in those times. When he could no longer be useful in active life, he laboured to win men to the love of peace and justice by the publication of his great work, which made a deep impression upon all the liberal-minded princes and ministers of that day, and contributed essentially to influence their public conduct. Alexander carried the Iliad of Homer in a golden casket, to inflame his love of conquest; whilst Gustavus Adolphus slept with the Treatise on the Laws of War and Peace under his pillow, in that heroic war which he waged in Germany for the liberties of Protestant Europe. It is difficult to decide which presents the most striking contrastthe poet of Greece and the philosopher of Holland, or the two heroes who imbibed such different and opposite sentiments from their pages.

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The treatise De Jure Belli ac Pacis was composed during the author's exile in France, and published at Paris in 1625. A very interesting summary of the life of Grotius

Nor was this the only immediate practical effect of this publication. Its enlightened and benevolent doctrines so forcibly struck the mind of that liberal sovereign, the Elector Palatine, Charles Lewis, that he founded at Heidelberg the first professorship of the law of nature and nations instituted in Europe, and bestowed the chair upon the celebrated Puffendorf, who used the treatise of Grotius as his text-book.12 Grotius thus became the creator of a new school of political philosophy, which laid the foundation for all those important improvements in the science of government, political economy, and legislation, which have marked the two last centuries as an æra in the progress of mankind. His work was illustrated by a crowd of commentators in the universities of Holland and Germany, and within forty

was published in 1826, by that venerable lawyer and excellent man, the late Charles Butler.

12 Puffendorf's principal work, De Jure Naturæ et Gentium, was first published in 1672, and subsequently abridged by the author, in a smaller treatise, entitled De Officio Hominis et Civis. The reputation of Puffendorf seems to have been founded more upon the fact of his having no cotemporary competitor than upon his real merit either as an inventor or compiler. Leibnitz calls him, Vir parum jurisconsultus, et minime philosophus.

years after his death obtained an honour which had been exclusively reserved, by the learned world, for the classical writers of antiquity it was edited cum commentariis variorum. His Latin style is sometimes obscured by an imitation of the sententious brevity of Tacitus; and the work sins against the prevailing taste of the present age, in being adorned with a profusion of illustrations from the writers of sacred and heathen antiquity. Yet it should be remembered, that these are so many different witnesses summoned to attest the concurring sentiments and usages of mankind among all ages and nations, and that their testimony was much more revered by the cotemporaries of Grotius than the unsupported authority or reasonings of any individual writer of their own time.13

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"I have used," says Grotius, "in proof of this law, "the testimony of philosophers, historians, poets, and, lastly, even of orators. Not that they are indiscriminately "to be relied on as impartial authority, since they often "bend to the prejudices of their sect, the nature of their

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argument, or the interest of their cause: but where many "minds of different ages and countries concur in affirming "the same sentiment, this general concurrence must be "referred to some general cause; which, in the questions we have undertaken to examine, can be no other than a

The great treatise of Grotius on the Law of Peace and War, defective as it confessedly is in scientific arrangement and distinctiveness of aim, produced a wonderful impression on the public mind of christian Europe, and gradually wrought a most salutary change in the practical intercourse of nations in favour of humanity and justice. This new science of natural jurisprudence, developed by the disciples of Grotius, and applied in the first instance to ascertain those rules of justice which ought to regulate the conduct of individuals in the social state, was subsequently adopted to determine the like rules which govern, or ought to govern, the conduct of independent nations and states, considered as moral beings living in a social state, independent of positive human institution. This gave

right induction from the principles of natural justice, or some common consent. The former indicates the law of "nature, the latter the law of nations: which difference is "not to be understood from the terms alone which these "authors use, (for they often confound the law of nature "with that of nations,) but from the nature of the subject "in question. For if a certain maxim, which cannot be "inferred as a corollary from the principles of natural "justice, is nevertheless found to be generally observed, "we must attribute its origin to the general consent of 'nations."- Proleg. § xli.