guilt in himself or in Oldenbarneveldt.  So the man, who was known to have been the actual writer of the Advocate’s Justification, continued to live in straitened circumstances at Paris, until Oxenstierna appointed him Swedish ambassador at the French court.  This post he held for eleven years.  Of his extraordinary ability, and of the variety and range of his knowledge, it is not possible to speak without seeming exaggeration.  Grotius was in his own time styled “the wonder of the world”; he certainly stands intellectually as one of the very foremost men the Dutch race has produced.  Scholar, jurist, theologian, philosopher, historian, poet, diplomatist, letter-writer, he excelled in almost every branch of knowledge and made himself a master of whatever subject he took in hand.  For the student of International Law the treatise of Grotius, De Jure belli et pacis, still remains the text-book on which the later superstructure has been reared.  His Mare liberum, written expressly to controvert the Portuguese claim of an exclusive right to trade and navigate in the Indian Ocean, excited much attention in Europe, and was taken by James I to be an attack on the oft-asserted dominium maris of the English crown in the narrow seas.  It led the king to issue a proclamation forbidding foreigners to fish in British waters (May, 1609).  Selden’s Mare clausum was a reply, written by the king’s command, to the Mare liberum.  Of his strictly historical works the Annales et Historiae de Rebus Belgicis, for its impartiality and general accuracy no less than for its finished and lucid style, stands out as the best of all contemporary accounts from the Dutch side of the Revolt of the Netherlands.  As a theologian Grotius occupied a high rank.  His De Veritate Religionis Christianae and his Annotationes in Vetus et in Novum Testamentum are now out of date; but the De Veritate was in its day a most valuable piece of Christian apologetic and was quickly translated into many languages.  The Annotationes have, ever since they were penned, been helpful to commentators on the Scriptures for their brilliancy and suggestiveness on many points of criticism and interpretation.  His voluminous correspondence, diplomatic, literary, confidential, is rich in information bearing on the history and the life of his time.  Several thousands of these letters have been collected and published.

But if the smouldering embers of bitter sectarian and party strife compelled the most brilliant of Holland’s own sons to spend the last twenty-three years of his life in a foreign capital and to enter the service of a foreign state, Holland was at the same time, as we have seen, gaining distinction by the presence within her hospitable boundaries of men of foreign extraction famous for their learning.