SALMASIIIS, CL.kmuus, the Latinized name of a celebrated French scholar, CLAUDE DE SAUNIAISE, who was at Semar, April 15, 1588. His father, Benigne de Sauinaise, a man of superior erudition, was his first teacher. At the age of ten, young Salmasius translated Piudar, and composed Greek and Latin verses. He studied philosophy at Paris, under the superintendence of Casaubon!' From Paris he proceeded to Heid.elberg, where he devoted himself to the science of jurisprudence, and publicly professed Protestantism, to which form of the Christian religion he had been secretly attached for many years. So insatiable at this time was his thirst for knowledge—book-knowledge, at least—that he was wont to devote two whole nights out of three to hard reading, in consequence of which he brought himself to within an inch of the grave. In 1609 he published from MSS. two treatises of the sectary, Nilus, archbishop of Thessalonica, and a work of tha monk Barlaam on the primacy of the pope. In 1629 appeared his chief work, Plinitno3 Exercitationes in Cali Julii Solimi Polyhistora (2 vols., Par. 1629); after the publicatioa of which he set himself Vigorously, and without the help of a master, to acquire a knowledge of Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, and other oriental tongues. In 1631 he was called to Leyden, to occupy the chair that Joseph Scaliger had held there, and it is from this period that his European reputation as a scholar and critic dates. Various efforts were made (1635-40) to induce Salmasius to return to France, but lie declined them oa time ground that his spirit was too " liberal " for his native land. Queen Christina of Sweden, however, managed to bring him to Stockholm, and fix him there for a year (1650-51), after which he returned to Holland. He died of a fever caught by impru
dently drinking the waters at Spa, Sept. 6, 1658. Salmasius was certainly a great scholar of the old-fashioned clumsy sort; but neither his wit nor his acumen was suffi ciently keen to give an intellectual and critical value to his lucubrations; and though all his distinguished contemporaries, Casaubon, Gronovitis. Grotins, Vossius, etc., deluged hint with praise; though Balzac pronounced him infallible; though the curators of the university of Leyden declared that "their university could no more do without Salmasius than the world without the sun ;" though Queen Christina went the length of saving, with truly royal flattery, "that she could not live without him,"—he is remembered, not for his inexhaustible stores of erudition, his editions of the classics, or his treatises on classical antiquities, but for his controversy with John Milton, scarcely his inferior in scholarship, and infinitely his superior in power of brain, and in all the arts of literary warfare. The question at issue was the lawfulness of the execution of Charles I. Apart altogether from the merits of the case, the great poet utterly overwhelmed his adversary, partly by the magnificence of his language and sentiments, and partly by the unscrupulous fury of liis invective. Salmasius also is grossly abusive and acrimonious in his treatise (Defensb Regia pro Carob I., 1649): asinus (ass), pecus (beast), and such-like expressions being showered about quite freely; but he is deficient in logic, in real force of sarcasm, and in intellectual vigor generally.