But this was not enough; a
defence in form was necessary, an _Apologia Socratis_, such as Plato
composed for his master after his death. It must not only be written
in Latin, but in such Latin as to ensure its being read.
In 1649 Charles II. was living at the Hague, and it so happened that
the man, who was in the highest repute in all Europe as a Latinist,
was professor at the neighbouring university of Leyden. Salmasius
(Claude de Saumaise) was commissioned to prepare a manifesto, which
should be at once a vindication of Charles's memory, and an indictment
against the regicide government. Salmasius was a man of enormous
reading and no judgment. He says of himself that he wrote Latin more
easily than his mother-tongue (French). And his Latin was all the
more readable because it was not classical or idiomatic. With all his
reading--and Isaac Casaubon had said of him when in his teens that he
had incredible erudition--he was still, at sixty, quite unacquainted
with public affairs, and had neither the politician's tact necessary
to draw a state paper as Clarendon would have drawn it, nor the
literary tact which had enabled Erasmus to command the ear of the
public.
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