heir
forlorn little households in the prison. Madame Daatselaer therefore
received and forwarded into Loevestein or into Holland many parcels and
boxes, besides attending to the periodical transmission of the mighty
chest of books.

Professor Vossius was then publishing a new edition of the tragedies of
Seneca, and at his request Grotius enriched that work, from his prison,
with valuable notes. He employed himself also in translating the moral
sentences extracted by Stobaeus from the Greek tragedies; drawing
consolation from the ethics and philosophy of the ancient dramatists,
whom he had always admired, especially the tragedies of Euripides; he
formed a complete moral anthology from that poet and from the works of
Sophocles, Menander, and others, which he translated into fluent Dutch
verse. Becoming more and more interested in the subject, he executed a
masterly rhymed translation of the 'Theban Brothers' of Euripides, thus
seeking distraction from his own tragic doom in the portraiture of
antique, distant, and heroic sorrow.

Turning again to legal science, he completed an Introduction to the
Jurisprudence of Holland, a work which as soon as published became
thenceforward a text-book and an oracle in the law courts and the high
schools of the country. Not forgetting theology, he composed for the use
of the humbler classes, especially for sailors, in whose lot, so exposed
to danger and temptation, he ever took deep interest, a work on the
proofs of Christianity in easy and familiar rhyme--a book of gold, as it
was called at once, which became rapidly popular with those for whom it
was designed.

At a somewhat later period Professor Erpenius, publishing a new edition
of the New Testament in Greek, with translations in Arabic, Syriac, and
Ethiopian, solicited his friend's help both in translations and in the
Latin commentaries and expositions with which he proposed to accompany
the work. The prisoner began with a modest disclaimer, saying that after
the labours of Erasmus and Beza, Maldonatus and Jasenius, there was
little for him to glean. Becoming more enthusiastic as he went on, he
completed a masterly commentary on the Four Evangelists, a work for which
the learned and religious world has ever recognized a kind of debt of
gratitude to the castle of Loevestein, and hailed in him the founder of a
school of manly Biblical criticism.

And thus nearly two years wore away. Spinning his great top for exercise;
soothing