The Royalists had felt the necessity of appealing to the general verdict of Europe, and had entrusted their cause to the most eminent classical scholar of the age.

To us the idea of commissioning a political manifesto from a philologist seems eccentric; but erudition and the erudite were never so highly prized as in the seventeenth century.

Men's minds were still enchained by authority, and the precedents of Agis, or Brutus, or Nehemiah, weighed like dicta of Solomon or Justinian.

The man of Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew learning was, therefore, a person of much greater consequence than he is now, and so much the more if he enjoyed a high reputation and wrote good Latin.
All these qualifications were combined in Claudius Salmasius, a Frenchman, who had laid scholars under an eternal obligation by his discovery of the Palatine MS.

of the Anthology at Heidelberg, and who, having embraced Protestantism from conviction, lived in splendid style at Leyden, where the mere light of his countenance--for he did not teach--was valued by the University at three thousand livres a year.