[581] Erasmus to Savage: Epist. clxxvi. June 1, 1516. Brewer, 1976.
[582] ‘There is certainly a steadiness of moral principle and Christian endurance, which tells us that it is better not to exist at all than to exist at the price of virtue; but few indeed of the countrymen and contemporaries of Machiavel had any claim to the practice, whatever they might have to the profession, of such integrity. His crime in the eyes of the world, and it was truly a crime, was to have cast away the veil of hypocrisy, the profession of a religious adherence to maxims which at the same moment were violated.’—Hallam’s Literature of the Middle Ages, chap. vii. s. 31.
[583] ‘Whatever may be thought of the long-disputed question as to Machiavelli’s motives in writing, his work certainly presents to us a gloomy picture of the state of public law and European society in the beginning of the sixteenth century: one mass of dissimulation, crime, and corruption, which called loudly for a great teacher and reformer to arise, who should speak the unambiguous language of truth and justice to princes and people, and stay the ravages of this moral pestilence.
‘Such a teacher and reformer was Hugo Grotius, who was born in the latter part of the same century and flourished in the beginning of the seventeenth.... He was one of those powerful minds which have paid the tribute of their assent to the truth of Christianity.’—Wheaton’s Elements of International Law: London, 1836, pp. 18, 19.
[584] 1st ed. leaf c, i.
[585] 1st ed. leaf d, ii. Eras. Op. iv. p. 567.
[586] 1st ed. leaf d, iii. Eras. Op. iv. p. 567.
[587] Leaf d, iii.
[588] 1st ed. leaf f, ii. Eras. Op. iv. p. 574.
[589] ‘Monarchia temperata,’ in the marginal reading.