So you've read Grotius, Hobbes and Montesquieu. What do you think of these three famous men?

I was often bored by Grotius; but he is very learned; apparently he loves reason and virtue; but reason and virtue don't affect you very much when they are boring. What's more, he sometimes seems to me to be very bad at arguing. Montesquieu is very imaginative on a subject that only appears to require judgement: he is too often mistaken about the facts; but I believe he also makes mistakes in his arguments. Hobbes is very tough, as is his style, but I fear his toughness often stems from truth. In short, Grotius is an utter pedant, Hobbes a sad philosopher and Montesquieu a fine wit.

I agree to some extent. Life is too short, and we have too much to do to learn from Grotius that, according to Tertullian, ‘cruelty, fraud and injustice are the companions of war’; that ‘Carnaedes defended error as much as truth’; that Horace said in a satire: ‘Nature cannot tell the just from the unjust’; that, according to Plutarch, ‘children have compassion’; that Chryssipus said ‘the origin of the law is in Jupiter’; that, if Florentine is to be believed, ‘nature has established a kind of kinship between men’; that Carnaedes said that ‘usefulness is the mother of justice’.

I confess that Grotius gives me great pleasure when he says, at the start of his first chapter in the first book, that ‘Jewish law did not bind foreigners.’