lustre of the university well sustained the nobility of its origin. The
proudest nation on earth might be more proud of a seat of learning,
founded thus amidst carnage and tears, whence so much of profound
learning and brilliant literature had already been diffused. The
classical labours of Joseph Scaliger, Heinsius father and son the elder
Dousa, almost as famous with his pen in Latin poetry as his sword had
made him in the vernacular chronicle; of Dousa the son, whom Grotius
called "the crown and flower of all good learning, too soon snatched away
by envious death, than whom no man more skilled in poetry, more
consummate in acquaintance with ancient science and literature, had ever
lived;" of Hugo Grotius himself, who at the age of fifteen had taken his
doctor's degree at Leyden who as a member of Olden-Barneveld's important
legation to France and England very soon afterwards had excited the
astonishment of Henry IV. and Elizabeth, who had already distinguished
himself by editions of classic poets, and by original poems and dramas in
Latin, and was already, although but twenty-six years of age; laying the
foundation of that magnificent reputation as a jurist, a philosopher, a
historian, and a statesman, which was to be one of the enduring glories
of humanity, all these were the precious possessions of the high school
of Leyden.

The still more modern university of Franeker, founded amid the din of
perpetual warfare in Friesland, could at least boast the name of
Arminius, whose theological writings and whose expansive views were
destined to exert such influence over his contemporaries and posterity.

The great history of Hoofd, in which the splendid pictures and the
impassioned drama of the great war of independence were to be preserved
for his countrymen through all time, was not yet written. It was soon
afterwards, however, to form not only a chief source of accurate
information as to the great events themselves, but a model of style never
since surpassed by any prose writer in either branch of the German
tongue.

Had Hoofd written for a wider audience, it would be difficult to name a
contemporary author of any nation whose work would have been more
profoundly studied or more generally admired.

But the great war had not waited to be chronicled by the classic and
impassioned Hoofd. Already there were thorough and exhaustive narrators
of what was instinctively felt to be one of the most pregnant episodes of
human