judice, hasty but inveterate, of which this eminent man seems to have been not a little susceptible.”
Dugald Stewart had read little of Grotius; and what little he had read, truth compels me to say that he did not care to understand, for I should be unwilling to suppose that he would have designedly distorted or misrepresented his doctrines. Far different were the views of Adam Smith, who speaks of Grotius, as of one who was the first “to attempt to give to the world anything like a system of those principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations; and his treatise on the laws of peace and war, with all its imperfections, is perhaps at this day the most complete book that has yet been given on the subject.”
It is a satisfaction to be able to quote the deliberate judgment of so learned and so temperate a writer as Mr. Hallam in defence of a work, the defects of which have been magnified by writers too careless to make themselves acquainted with its merits, or strongly prejudiced, like Rousseau and other French writers, against the method of reasoning. The author, however, of the History of the Inductive Sciences, than whom perhaps no one is better versed in the Baconian method, has felt called upon not merely to defend Grotius, but to undertake an edition of his great work, which has lately appeared under the auspices of the syndics of the press of the university of Cambridge. “The work itself,” Dr. Whewell considers “to be characterised by solid philosophical principles consistently applied, by clear and orderly distinction of parts, by definite and exact notions, improved by the intellectual discipline of legal studies, by a pure and humane morality, always inclining to the higher side in disputed questions, and
