FOOTNOTES: 

[5] Stobaeus, Tit. 98. p. 413.

[6] Ep. xxii. p. 751.

[7] Ep. 499. p. 898.  Grotii Ep. 638. p. 948.

V. Of the marriage of John de Groot with Alida Averschie was born the celebrated Hugo de Groot, better known by the name of Grotius:  he was the first fruit of their coming together.  Almost all who have mentioned his birth[8] fix it on the tenth of April 1583.  The President Bouhier pretends they place it a year too late; and that he was born on the tenth of April 1582.  To prevent the authority of such a learned man, which has already seduced several writers, from misleading others, we shall shew that by departing from the general opinion he has fallen into an error.  Grotius writes to Vossius on Easter Sunday 1615[9], that on that day he reckoned thirty-two years:  He dates another letter[10] to Vossius the twenty-fifth of March 1617; Easter-eve, “which, he observes, begins my thirty-fifth year.”  April 11, 1643, he says he had completed sixty years[11].  On Easter-day 1644 he reckons sixty-one years[12].  He acquaints us in his Poems[13], that he was fifteen when he went first to France:  he went there in 1598; and speaking of Easter 1614 he informs us[14] he was then one-and-thirty.  From all these different calculations it is manifest that Grotius was born in 1583.

It must be owned, however, that the proof on which the President Bouhier builds his opinion, would be decisive, if there were no error in the text of a[15] letter written by Grotius to his brother, April 14, 1640, in which he says, “I have completed my fifty-eighth year:”  but the other passages of Grotius just cited demonstrate that the editors of this letter, instead of incepi, I have begun, read implevi, I have completed:  which Grotius could not have written without contradicting himself.

FOOTNOTES: 

[8] Athenae Batavae, p. 205.  Life of Grotius prefixed to his works.  Le Clerc, Hist. de Hollande, l. 12. t. 2.  See the critical Remarks on Bayle’s Dict. ed. 1734.

[9] Ep. 55. p. 18.

[10] Ep. 95. p. 41.

[11] Ep. 648. p. 952.

[12] Ep. 697. p. 965.

[13] Page 213.

[14] Poemata, p. 217.

[15] Ep. 491. p. 896.

VI.  It was therefore on the tenth of April in the year 1583, that Grotius was born, at Delft.  It was Easter-Sunday that year:  and he always observed the anniversary of that feast as his birth-day[16].

He came into the world with the most happy dispositions.  Nature bestowed on him a profound genius, a solid judgment, and a wonderful memory.  Several authors report[17] that being employed to review some regiments he retained the name of every soldier.  He was but eight years old, when, in 1591, he wrote some elegiac verses, very pretty for that age:  afterwards he thought them not good enough to publish.  M. le Clerc informs us, that he had seen a copy of them in the possession of a very able man, who purposed to write the life of Grotius.