.

On leaving the University he was attached to the embassy of Barneveld and
Justinus van Nassau to the court of Henry IV. Here he attracted the
attention of that monarch, who pointed him out to his courtiers as the
"miracle of Holland," presented him with a gold chain with his miniature
attached to it, and proposed to confer on him the dignity of knighthood,
which the boy from motives of family pride appears to have refused. While
in France he received from the University of Orleans, before the age of
fifteen, the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in a very eulogistic
diploma. On his return to Holland he published an edition of the poet
Johannes Capella with valuable annotations, besides giving to the public
other learned and classical works and several tragedies of more or less
merit. At the age of seventeen he was already an advocate in full
practice before the supreme tribunals of the Hague, and when twenty-three
years old he was selected by Prince Maurice from a list of three
candidates for the important post of Fiscal or Attorney-General of
Holland. Other civic dignities, embassies, and offices of various kinds,
had been thrust upon him one after another, in all of which he had
acquitted himself with dignity and brilliancy. He was but twenty-six when
he published his argument for the liberty of the sea, the famous Mare
Liberum, and a little later appeared his work on the Antiquity of the
Batavian Republic, which procured for him in Spain the title of "Hugo
Grotius, auctor damnatus." At the age of twenty-nine he had completed his
Latin history of the Netherlands from the period immediately preceding
the war of independence down to the conclusion of the Truce, 1550-1609--a
work which has been a classic ever since its appearance, although not
published until after his death. A chief magistrate of Rotterdam, member
of the States of Holland and the States-General, jurist, advocate,
attorney-general, poet, scholar, historian, editor of the Greek and Latin
classics, writer of tragedies, of law treatises, of theological
disquisitions, he stood foremost among a crowd of famous contemporaries.
His genius, eloquence, and learning were esteemed among the treasures not
only of his own country but of Europe. He had been part and parcel of his
country's history from his earliest manhood, and although a child in
years compared to Barneveld, it was upon him that the great statesman had
mainly relied ever since the youth's first app