More, and Campanella. The four Ideal Republics or Governments described in this volume are perhaps the most famous of all, since they rank not only as great creations of the imagination but as literature of the highest class; and their writers have a further claim upon posterity from the fact that they helped to make history.

The Third and concluding Section of the Library deals with that tremendous range of world-wide literature which we call, for want of a better name, Belles Lettres. Goethe contributes his brilliant and sagacious observations on men and things as he communicated them to Eckerman. Landor, of whom Swinburne has said that Milton alone stands higher, both in prose and verse, furnishes us with his Classical Conversations. Montesquieu and Goldsmith are drawn on for their Persian and Chinese Letters. Lord Chesterfield gives us the irony and hard-headed criticism combined with worldly common sense contained in the Letters to His Son, and the various names best known in French and English Belles Lettres yield what is greatest in them. Ottoman Literature, comprising Arabian, Persian, and Hebraic Poems, affords the reader an insight into the romantic and dramatic character of the Oriental. The Dabistan, possibly the most extraordinary book ever written in the East, finds itself at home in this section, while the Literature of the Hebrews is ideally represented in that most wonderful of all monuments of human wisdom, and perhaps folly, the "Talmud," together with the basis of modern metaphysics, the "Kabbala."

The Sufistic Quatrains of Omar Khayyam are here for the first time presented complete in a collection of this order. The various editions of Fitzgerald are reprinted, collated, and to them is added the valuable Heron-Allen analysis of Fitzgerald's sources of inspiration. The very rare Whinfield version is found here complete; and for the first time in English appears M. Nicolas' French transcription of the Teheran Manuscript. It is safe to say that any lover of Omar wishing to add to his collection the versions here quoted would be compelled to disburse more than one hundred times the amount this book will cost him.

While the Library of Universal Classics does not claim to be the final condensation of the treasure houses of human philosophy and lore, whether practical or ideal, it does most emphatically assert its right to be called the most useful, most attractive, and most representative selection, within the limits assigned to it, of those world-masterpieces of literature which men, for lack of a more luminous name, call Classics.

HUGO GROTIUS

From an Original Painting.

THE RIGHTS OF
WAR AND PEACE

INCLUDING THE

LAW OF NATURE
AND OF NATIONS

TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL LATIN OF
GROTIUS

WITH NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS FROM
POLITICAL AND LEGAL WRITERS

BY
A. C. CAMPBELL, A. M.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
DAVID J. Hill,
Assistant Secretary of State of the United States

M. WALTER DUNNE, PUBLISHER
NEW YORK & LONDON

Copyright, 1901,
BY
M. WALTER DUNNE,
PUBLISHER

ILLUSTRATIONS

CONTENTS