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 southern provinces, the domain of our inquiry is confined to the district north of the Scheldt.

In the chamber of the Eglantine at Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place, more by their intelligence and modern spirit than by their original genius. Hendrick Laurenssen Spieghel (1549–1612) was a humanist of a type more advanced and less polemical than Coornhert. He wrote a charming poem in praise of dancing; but his chief contributions to literature were his Tweespraeck van de nederduytsche letterkunst, a philological exhortation, in the manner of Joachim du Bellay’s famous tract, urging the Dutch nation to purify and enrich its tongue at the fountains of antiquity, and a didactic epic, entitled Hertspieghel (1614), which has been greatly praised, but which is now much more antiquated in style and more difficult to enjoy than Coornhert’s prose of a similar tendency. That Spieghel was a Catholic prevented him perhaps from exercising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who, in 1614, first collected Spieghel’s writings, and published them in a volume with his own verses. Roemer Pieterssen Visscher (1547–1620) proceeded a step further than Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning that was much more genuine and nearer to the true antique than any that had previously been known in Holland. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

It was in the salon at Amsterdam which the beautiful daughters of Roemer Visscher formed around their father and themselves that the new school began to take form. The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to the first rank among the nations of Europe, and it was under the influence of so much new emotion and brilliant ambition that the country no less suddenly asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry. The intellect of the whole Low Countries was concentrated in Holland and Zealand, while the six great universities, Leiden, Groningen, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Harderwijk and Franeker, were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant. It had occurred, however, to Roemer Visscher only that the path of literary honour lay, not along the utilitarian road cut out by Maerlant and Boendale, but in the study of beauty and antiquity. In this he was curiously aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch, but who chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity. Out of that generation arose the greatest names in the literature of Holland—Vondel, Hooft, Cats, Huygens—in whose hands the language, so long left barbarous and neglected, took at once its highest finish and melody. By the side of this serious and aesthetic growth there is to be noticed a quickening of the broad and farcical humour which had been characteristic of the Dutch nation from its commencement. For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Bredero, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics.

Of the famous daughters of Roemer, two cultivated literature with marked success. Anna (1584–1651) was the author of a descriptive and didactic poem, De Roemster van den Aemstel (The Glory of the Aemstel), and of various miscellaneous writings;Tesselschade (1594–1649) wrote some lyrics which still place her at the head of the female poets of Holland, and she translated the great poem of Tasso. They were women of universal accomplishment, graceful manners and singular beauty; and their company attracted to the house of Roemer Visscher all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.

Of this Amsterdam school, the first to emerge into public notice was Pieter Cornelissen Hooft (1581–1647). His Achilles and Polyxena (1598) displayed a precocious ease in the use of rhetorical artifices of style. In his pastoral drama of Granida (1605) he proved himself a pupil of Guarini. In tragedy he produced Baeto and Geraad van Velsen; in history he published in 1626 his Life of Henry the Great, while from 1628 to 1642 he was engaged upon his master-work, the History of Holland. Hooft desired to be a severe purist in style, and to a great extent he succeeded, but, like most of the writers of his age, he permitted himself too many Latinisms. In his poetry, especially in the lyrical and pastoral verse of his youth, he is full of Italian reminiscences both of style and matter; in his noble prose work he has set himself to be a disciple of Tacitus. Motley has spoken of Hooft as one of the greatest historians, not merely of Holland, but of Europe. His influence in purifying the language of his country, and in enlarging its sphere of experience, can hardly be overrated.

Very different from the long and prosperous career of Hooft was the brief, painful life of the greatest comic dramatist that Holland has produced. Gerbrand Adriaanssen Bredero (1585–1618), the son of an Amsterdam shoemaker, was born on the 16th of March 1585. He knew no Latin; he had no taste for humanism; he was a simple growth of the rich humour of the people. He entered the workshop of the painter Francisco Badens, but accomplished little in art. His life was embittered by a hopeless love for Tesselschade, to whom he dedicated his dramas, and whose beauty he celebrated in a whole cycle of love songs. His ideas on the subject of drama were at first a mere development of the medieval “Abelespelen.” The “Oude Kammer,” one of the chambers of rhetoric, furnished an opening for his dramatic powers. He commenced by dramatizing the romance of Roderick and Alphonsus, in 1611, and Griane in 1612, but in the latter year he struck out a new and more characteristic path in his Farce of the Cow. From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a coarse, rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, whose immediate contemporary he was. His last and best piece was Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter, a satire upon the exiles from the south who filled the halls of the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric with their pompous speeches and preposterous Burgundian phraseology. The piece was based on a Dutch version (Delft, 1609) of an early Spanish picaresque romance, La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (Burgos, 1554). Bredero was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school, and stands almost as a solitary figure in the literature of Holland. He died on the 23rd of August 1618. Theodore Rodenburg (d. 1644), ridiculed by Bredero for his pretentiousness, had a wider knowledge of contemporary foreign literature than the other dramatists. He adapted some of the dramas of Lope de Vega, which he had witnessed at Madrid, into Dutch, and in 1618 he adapted Cyril Tourneur’s Revenger’s Tragedy.

The only individual at all clearly connected with Bredero in talent was Dr Samuel Coster, who was born at Amsterdam on the 16th of September 1579. He studied medicine at Leiden, and practised at Amsterdam. He is chiefly remembered for