t. And thus Arminianism, deprived of
its chiefs, was for the time completely stifled. The Remonstrants,
thrown into utter despair, looked to emigration as their last
resource. Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, and Frederick, duke
of Holstein, offered them shelter and protection in their respective
states. Several availed themselves of these offers; but the
states-general, alarmed at the progress of self-expatriation,
moderated their rigor, and thus checked the desolating evil.
Several of the imprisoned Arminians had the good fortune to elude
the vigilance of their jailers; but the escape of Grotius is
the most remarkable of all, both from his own celebrity as one
of the first writers of his age in the most varied walks of
literature, and from its peculiar circumstances, which only found
a parallel in European history after a lapse of two centuries.
We allude to the escape of Lavalette from the prison of the
Conciergerie in Paris in 1815, which so painfully excited the
interest of all Europe for the intended victim's wife, whose
reason was the forfeit of her exertion.

Grotius was freely allowed during his close imprisonment all the
relaxations of study. His friends supplied him with quantities of
books, which were usually brought into the fortress in a trunk two
feet two inches long, which the governor regularly and carefully
examined during the first year. But custom brought relaxation in
the strictness of the prison rules; and the wife of the illustrious
prisoner, his faithful and constant visitor, proposed the plan of
his escape, to which he gave a ready and, all hazards considered,
a courageous assent. Shut up in this trunk for two hours, and
with all the risk of suffocation, and of injury from the rude
handling of the soldiers who carried it out of the fort, Grotius
was brought clear off by the very agents of his persecutors,
and safely delivered to the care of his devoted and discreet
female servant, who knew the secret and kept it well. She attended
the important consignment in the barge to the town of Gorcum;
and after various risks of discovery, providentially escaped,
Grotius at length found himself safe beyond the limits of his
native land. His wife, whose torturing suspense may be imagined
the while, concealed the stratagem as long as it was possible
to impose on the jailer with the pardonable and praiseworthy
fiction of her husband's illness and confinement to his bed.
The government, outrageous at the