The Life and Death of John of Barneveld, Advocate of Holland, 1619-23 | Page 8

as famous for literature, science, and municipal abilities as their
more distant progenitors for deeds of arms in the feudal struggles of
Holland in the middle ages.
His father and grandfather had alike been eminent for Hebrew, Greek,
and Latin scholarship, and both had occupied high positions in the
University of Leyden from its beginning. Hugo, born and nurtured
under such quickening influences, had been a scholar and poet almost
from his cradle. He wrote respectable Latin verses at the age of seven,
he was matriculated at Leyden at the age of eleven. That school,
founded amid the storms and darkness of terrible war, was not lightly
to be entered. It was already illustrated by a galaxy of shining lights in
science and letters, which radiated over Christendom. His professors
were Joseph Scaliger, Francis Junius, Paulus Merula, and a host of
others. His fellow-students were men like Scriverius, Vossius, Baudius,
Daniel Heinsius. The famous soldier and poet Douza, who had
commanded the forces of Leyden during the immortal siege, addressed
him on his admission to the university as "Magne peer magni
dignissime cura parentis," in a copy of eloquent verses.
When fourteen years old, he took his bachelor's degree, after a rigorous
examination not only in the classics but astronomy, mathematics,
jurisprudence, and theology, at an age when most youths would have
been accounted brilliant if able to enter that high school with credit.
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
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, of whom it is difficult to speak but in
terms of