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 appearance in public affairs.
Impressible, emotional, and susceptive, he had been accused from time to
time, perhaps not entirely without reason, of infirmity of purpose, or at
least of vacillation in opinion; but his worst enemies had never assailed
the purity of his heart or integrity of his character. He had not yet
written the great work on the 'Rights of War and Peace', which was to
make an epoch in the history of civilization and to be the foundation of
a new science, but the materials lay already in the ample storehouse of
his memory and his brain.

Possessed of singular personal beauty--which the masterly portraits of
Miereveld attest to the present day--tall, brown-haired;
straight-featured, with a delicate aquiline nose and piercing dark blue
eyes, he was also athletic of frame and a proficient in manly exercises.
This was the statesman and the scholar,