informs us, that in the Library of the College of Leyden there is a copy of the Geneva edition of Stobaeus, in the year 1609, with several notes in Grotius’s own hand.  Three years after the publication of his Stobaeus, Grotius printed a work which may be looked upon as a continuation of it; being an extract of the Comedies and Tragedies of the Greeks:  the text is translated into Latin verse.  In this work he inserted only such maxims as he thought best worth preserving.  He began it, as we have observed, when a prisoner at Louvestein.  The learned Fabricius very judiciously remarks, that it is to be regretted he did not mention the places of the Ancients from whence he took these extracts.

VII.  After having lived a year in the noise of Paris he was desirous of enjoying for some time the quiet of the country.  The President de Meme offered him one of his seats, Balagni near Senlis.  Grotius accepted it, and passed there the spring and summer of the year 1623.  In this castle he began his great work[146] which singly would be sufficient to render its author’s name immortal; I mean the treatise Of the rights of war and peace, of which we shall speak more fully elsewhere.  He had with him his family and four friends; and was visited by the most distinguished men of learning, among others Salmasius and Rigaut.  He had all the books he could desire:  Francis de Thou the President’s son, who succeeded to his father’s library, one of the best in Europe, gave him the free use of it.  Grotius, who knew the President de Meme to be a most zealous Roman Catholic, was careful to regulate his conduct in such a manner that the President might never repent his favouring him with the use of his house:  he gave directions that while he was at Balagni no butchers meat should be brought to table on Fridays or Saturdays; he received none of the Dutch refugee Ministers there; no psalms nor hymns were sung; in fine, he would have no public nor even private exercise of the Protestant Religion performed; and would see only those whom he could not decently refuse.  From Balagni he sometimes made excursions to St. Germain, where the court was, in order to cultivate the friendship of the ministry.  Having learnt that the President de Meme wanted to reside himself at Balagni, he quitted it, and retired to Senlis in the beginning of August:  in October he came back to Paris.

His wife’s affairs obliging her to make a journey to Zealand, she set out for that province in the summer 1624.  In her absence Grotius was seized with a violent dysentery.  October 18th, 1624, he writes to his brother that he had been three weeks confined to his bed, and four times blooded.  The news of his illness threw his wife into a fever.  As soon as it was abated she set out for Paris without waiting the return of her strength.  The pleasure of seeing her again and the care she took of him wrought a wonderful change in Grotius:  in fine, after two months dangerous illness he began to mend, and in a little time was perfectly recovered, so that he was never in better health than in the beginning of the year 1625.