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Rh reduced to great straits. He looked about for any opening through which he might earn a living. There was talk of something in Denmark; or he would settle in Spires, and practise in the court there. Some little relief he got through the intervention of Étienne d’Aligre, the chancellor, who procured a royal mandate which enabled Grotius to draw, not all, but a large part of his pension. In 1623 the president Henri de Même lent him his château of Balagni near Senlis (dep. Oise), and there Grotius passed the spring and summer of that year. De Thou gave him facilities to borrow books from the superb library formed by his father.

In these circumstances the De jure belli et pacis was composed. That a work of such immense reading, consisting in great part of quotation, should have been written in little more than a year was a source of astonishment to his biographers. The achievement would have been impossible, but for the fact that Grotius had with him the first draft of the work made in 1604. He had also got his brother William, when reading his classics, to mark down all the passages which touched upon law, public or private. In March 1625 the printing of the De jure belli, which had taken four months, was completed, and the edition despatched to the fair at Frankfort. His own honorarium as author consisted of 200 copies, of which, however, he had to give away many to friends, to the king, the principal courtiers, the papal nuncio, &c. What remained he sold for his own profit at the price of a crown each, but the sale did not recoup him his outlay. But though his book brought him no profit it brought him reputation, so widely spread, and of such long endurance, as no other legal treatise has ever enjoyed.

Grotius hoped that his fame would soften the hostility of his foes, and that his country would recall him to her service. Theological rancour, however, prevailed over all other sentiments, and, after fruitless attempts to re-establish himself in Holland, Grotius accepted service under Sweden, in the capacity of ambassador to France. He was not very successful in negotiating the treaty on behalf of the Protestant interest in Germany, Richelieu having a special dislike to him. He never enjoyed the confidence of the court to which he was accredited, and frittered away his influence in disputes about precedence. In 1645 he demanded and obtained his recall. He was honourably received at Stockholm, but neither the climate nor the tone of the court suited him, and he asked permission to leave. He was driven by a storm on the coast near Dantzig. He got as far as Rostock, where he found himself very ill. Stockman, a Scottish physician who was sent for, thought it was only weakness, and that rest would restore the patient. But Grotius sank rapidly, and died on the 29th of August 1645.

Grotius combined a wide circle of general knowledge with a profound study of one branch of law. History, theology, jurisprudence, politics, classics, poetry,—all these fields he cultivated. His commentaries on the Scriptures were the first application on an extensive scale of the principle affirmed by Scaliger, that, namely, of interpretation by the rules of grammar without dogmatic assumptions. Grotius’s philological skill, however, was not sufficient to enable him to work up to this ideal.

As in many other points Grotius inevitably recalls Erasmus, so he does in his attitude towards the great schism. Grotius was, however, animated by an ardent desire for peace and concord. He thought that a basis for reconciliation of Protestant and Catholic might be found in a common piety, combined with reticence upon discrepancies of doctrinal statement. His De veritate religionis Christianae (1627), a presentment of the evidences, is so written as to form a code of common Christianity, irrespective of sect. The little treatise became widely popular, gaining rather than losing popularity in the 18th century. It became the classical manual of apologetics in Protestant colleges, and was translated for missionary purposes into Arabic (by Pococke, 1660), Persian, Chinese, &c. His Via et votum ad pacem ecclesiasticam (1642) was a detailed proposal of a scheme of accommodation. Like all men of moderate and mediating views, he was charged by both sides with vacillation. An Amsterdam minister, James Laurent, published his Grotius papizans (1642), and it was continually being announced from Paris that Grotius had “gone over.” Hallam, who has collected all the passages from Grotius’s letters in which the prejudices and narrow tenets of the Reformed clergy are condemned, thought he had a “bias towards popery” (Lit. of Europe, ii. 312). The true interpretation of Grotius’s mind appears to be an indifference to dogmatic propositions, produced by a profound sentiment of piety. He approached parties as a statesman approaches them, as facts which have to be dealt with, and governed, not suppressed in the interests of some one of their number.

His editions and translations of the classics were either juvenile exercises prescribed by Scaliger, or “lusus poetici,” the amusement of vacant hours. Grotius read the classics as a humanist, for the sake of their contents, not as a professional scholar.

His Annals of the Low Countries was begun as an official duty while he held the appointment of historiographer, and was being continued and retouched by him to the last. It was not published till 1657, by his sons Peter and Cornelius.

Grotius was a great jurist, and his De jure belli et pacis (Paris, 1625), though not the first attempt in modern times to ascertain the principles of jurisprudence, went far more fundamentally into the discussion than any one had done before him. The title of the work was so far misleading that the jus belli was a very small part of his comprehensive scheme. In his treatment of this narrower question he had the works of Alberico Gentili and Ayala before him, and has acknowledged his obligations to them. But it is in the larger questions to which he opened the way that the merit of Grotius consists. His was the first attempt to obtain a principle of right, and a basis for society and government, outside the church or the Bible. The distinction between religion on the one hand and law and morality on the other is not indeed clearly conceived by Grotius, but he wrestles with it in such a way as to make it easy for those who followed him to seize it. The law of nature is unalterable; God Himself cannot alter it any more than He can alter a mathematical axiom. This law has its source in the nature of man as a social being; it would be valid even were there no God, or if God did not interfere in the government of the world. These positions, though Grotius’s religious temper did not allow him to rely unreservedly upon them, yet, even in the partial application they find in his book, entitle him to the honour of being held the founder of the modern science of the law of nature and nations. The De jure exerted little influence on the practice of belligerents, yet its publication was an epoch in the science. De Quincey has said that the book is equally divided between “empty truisms and time-serving Dutch falsehoods.” For a saner judgment and a brief abstract of the contents of the De jure, consult J. K. Bluntschli, Geschichte des allgemeinen Staatsrechts (Munich, 1864). A fuller analysis, and some notice of the predecessors of Grotius, will be found in Hély, Étude sur le droit de la guerre de Grotius (Paris, 1875). The writer, however, had never heard of the De jure praedae, published in 1868. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, ii. p. 543, has an abstract done with his usual conscientious pains. Dugald Stewart (Collected Works, i. 370) has dwelt upon the confusion and defects of Grotius’s theory. Sir James Mackintosh (Miscell. Works, p. 166) has defended Grotius, affirming that his work “is perhaps the most complete that the world has yet owed, at so early a stage in the progress of any science, to the genius and learning of one man.”

The chief writings of Grotius have been named. For a complete bibliography of his works, see Lehmann, Hugonis Grotii manes vindicati (Delft, 1727), which also contains a full biography. Of this Latin life De Burigny published a réchauffée in French (2 vols., 8vo, Paris, 1752). Other lives are: Van Brandt, Historie van het Leven H. de Groot (2 vols., 8vo, Dordrecht, 1727); Von Luden, Hugo Grotius nach seinen Schicksalen und Schriften dargestellt (8vo, Berlin, 1806); Life of Hugo Grotius, by Charles Butler of Lincoln’s Inn (8vo, London, 1826). The work of the Abbé Hély contains a life of Grotius. See also Hugo Grotius, by L. Neumann (Berlin, 1884); Opinions of Grotius, by D. P. de Bruyn (London, 1894).

Grotius’s theological works were collected in 3 vols. fol. at Amsterdam (1644–1646; reprinted London, 1660; Amsterdam, 1679; and again Amsterdam, 1698). His letters were printed first in a selection, Epistolae ad Gallos (12mo, Leiden, 1648), abounding, though an Elzevir, in errors of the press. They were collected in H.