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Updated: June 8, 2025
He had been extremely intimate with Salmasius: he had received letters from him filled with the most expressive testimonies of friendship ; and Grotius had informed him of the happy change of his fortune, because he looked upon him as one of his best friends: they had long kept up a learned correspondence by letters, in which we find a reciprocal esteem and the greatest politeness; but when Grotius set up for a Mediator, Salmasius publicly declared, that he disapproved of the way of reconciliation proposed by Grotius ; and from that time his friendship changed into bitter enmity.
In 1649 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so happened that the man, who was in the highest repute in all Europe as a Latinist, was professor at the neighbouring university of Leyden. Salmasius was a man of enormous reading and no judgment. And his Latin was all the more readable because it was not classical or idiomatic.
But the conditions of retort which he had chosen to accept neutralised this superiority. His greater power was spent in a greater force of invective. Instead of setting out the case of the Parliament in all the strength of which it was capable, Milton is intent upon tripping up Salmasius, contradicting him, and making him odious or ridiculous.
Lightfoot, we believe, will hardly pretend to say that Vossius, Bull, and Waterland stand higher in the literary world than Salmasius, John Milton, and Augustus Neander; and he will greatly astonish those who are acquainted with the history and writings of one of the fathers of the Reformation, if he will contend that John Calvin must be placed only in the second or third class of Protestant theologians.
Southey has thought proper to put the author of Paradise Lost into his late Heaven, on the understood condition that he is 'no longer to kings and to hierarchs hostile. In his lifetime he gave no sign of such an alteration; and it is rather presumptuous in the poet-laureate to pursue the deceased antagonist of Salmasius into the other world to compliment him with his own infirmity of purpose.
The highest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, from which, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified in using Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "I am not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave, but, by the grace of God, I have kept my life unsullied."
He died at Spa, where he was taking the waters, in September, 1653, and his reply was not published till 1660, after the Restoration, when all interest had died out of the controversy. If it be true that the work was written at Spa, without books at hand, it is certainly a miraculous effort of memory. It does no credit to Salmasius.
In Salmasius, Milton had at least been measuring his Latin against the Latin of the first classicist of the age. In Alexander Morus he wreaked august periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a graeculus esuriens, who appeared against Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the representative of the opposite principle.
Salmasius, in his notes on Solinus, styles him Virum excellentissimæ doctrinæ in omni genere litterarum; Selden, in his Mare clausum, virum acuminis et omnigenæ doctrinæ præstantiâ incomparabilem; Gerard Vossius, in his Latin Poems, Seculi nostri grande ornamentum; Pricæus, on the xivth of St.
But the unpopular library must not be overlooked, for, after all, libraries are for the learned. We must not let the babes and sucklings, or the weary seamstress or badgered clerk, or even the working-man, ride rough-shod over Salmasius and Scaliger. In the papers of Mr. Garnett, Mr. Pollard, Mr. Dziatzko, Mr. Cutter, and others, the less popular and nobler side of the library is duly exhibited.
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