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. It
seems marvellous that a man should become dictator of the republic of
letters by editing "Solinus" and "The Augustan History," however ably;
but an achievement like this, not a "Paradise Lost" or a "Werther" was
the _sic itur ad astra_ of the time. On the strength of such Salmasius
had pronounced _ex cathedra_ on a multiplicity of topics, from
episcopacy to hair-powder, and there was no bishop and no perfumer
between the Black Sea and the Irish who would not rather have the
scholar for him than against him. A man, too, to be named with respect;
no mere annotator, but a most sagacious critic; peevish, it might be,
but had he not seven grievous disorders at once? One who had shown such
independence and integrity in various transactions of his life, that we
may be very sure that Charles II.'s hundred Jacobuses, if ever given or
even promised, were the very least of the inducements that called him
into the field against the executioners of Charles I.

Whether, however, the hundred Jacobuses were forthcoming or not,
Salmasius's undertaking was none the less a commission from Charles II.,
and the circumstance put him into a false position, and increased the
difficulty of his task. Human feeling is not easily reconciled to the
execution of a bad magistrate, unless he has also been a bad man.
Charles I. was by no means a bad man, only a mistaken one. He had been
guilty of many usurpations and much perfidy: but he had honestly