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Cardinal Richelieu, though not prejudiced in favour of Grotius, ranked him however among the three first scholars of the age: the other two were Claudius Salmasius, and Jerom Bignon. This famous Advocate-General said of Grotius , that he was the most learned man who had appeared in the world since Aristotle. Foreigners who loved the sciences would not leave France without seeing Grotius.
Such men there were in his day, Usher, Selden, Voss, in England; in Holland, Milton's adversary Salmasius, and many more. Milton had neither made these acquisitions, nor aimed at them. He even expresses himself, in his vehement way, with contempt of them.
I see, he writes to Vossius , that those who have erected new Churches among us, have followed their own ideas, but have not always advanced the affairs of Religion." Salmasius was as zealous for the pretended reformed religion, as he was become indifferent to Grotius. However they visited one another, but it was with much coldness. Peter never set foot in Italy.
As he knew that Salmasius had made this collection his particular study, he requests him, June 11, 1635 , to communicate to him the corrections he had made in the Greek text, either by the assistance of manuscripts, or from his own conjectures. He gives a long account of his design to Gerard Vossius, in a letter of the 20th of December, 1635.
This was natural, for very few people on the continent knew what cause had brought his father to the block, or why he himself was a vagrant exile from his throne. For his advocate he selected Claudius Salmasius, and that was most injudicious. Salmasius betrayed in his work entire ignorance of everything, whether historical or constitutional, which belonged to the case.
Sarrau writes thus to Salmasius, March 15, 1645 . "Grotius is preparing to set out for Sweden after Easter, to complain of the injury done to him by appointing for his successor a young man who was his rival. He must however obey; and return into a private station: but this Colossus, though thrown down, will be always great; this statue will still be very high without its base."
And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience." The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provoked Milton to a learned outbreak of bad manners.
These authorities he deployed at tedious length, and followed them up with heavy scurrilities and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two knights in full armor striking at each other with ponderous maces.
The news of Grotius's death was scarce spread over Europe, when Salmasius poured out all his venom in a letter written from Leyden, Nov. 20, 1645, to Sarrau . "You think Grotius, says he, the first among the learned; for my part, I give that rank to Vossius.
"He and Salmasius were the greatest scholars or their time," he writes in another letter . And in another place, "Peter Grotius, says he , was son of the first man of his age."
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