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97 LITERATURE.] concentrated study. His parents were zealous in the cause of the house of Orange, and the youth grew up violently monarchical and Calvinistic, as Da Costa says, &quot;anti- revolutionary, anti-Barneveldtian, anti-Loevesteinish, anti- liberal.&quot; In poetry bis taste was strictly national and didactic ; he began as a disciple of Cats, nor could he to the end of his life tolerate what he called &quot; the puerilities of Shakespeare.&quot; His early love-songs, collected in 1781 and 1785, gave little promise of talent, but in his epic of Ellas in 1786, he showed himself superior to all the Dutch poets since Huygens in mastery of form. For twenty years he lived a busy, eventful life, writing great quantities of verse, and then commenced his most productive period with his didactic poem of The Disease of the Learned, in 1807; in 1808 he imitated Pope s Essay on Man, and published Floris V., and in 1809 commenced the work which he designed to be his master- piece, the epic of De Ondergang der eerste Wereld (The Destruction of the First World), which he never finished, and which appeared as a fragment in 1820. His long and fretful life ceased on the 18th of December 1831. To the foreign student Bilderdijk is a singularly uninviting and unpleasing figure. He unites in himself all the unlovely and provincial features which deform the worst of his countrymen. He was violent, ignorant, and dull ; his view of art was confined to its de clamatory and least beautiful side, and perhaps no writer of equal talent has shown so complete an absence of taste and tact. Ten Brink has summed up the character of Bilderdijk s writings in an excellent passage : &quot; As an artist,&quot; he says, &quot;he can perhaps be best described in short as the cleverest versemaker of the 18th century. His admirable erudition, his power over language, more extended and more colossal than that of any of his predecessors, enabled him to write pithy and thoroughly original verses, although the general tone of his thought and expression never rose above the ceremonious, stagy, and theatrical character of the 18th century.&quot; But in spite of his out rageous faults, and partly because these faults were the exaggeration of a marked national failing, Bilderdijk has enjoyed almost to the present day an unbroken and un bounded popularity in Holland. Fortunately, however, within the last few years a sounder spirit has arisen in criti cism, and the prestige of Bilderdijk is no longer preserved so religiously. Bilderdijk s scorn for the dramas of Shakespeare was almost rivalled by that he felt for the new German poetry. Notwithstanding his opposition, however, the romantic fervour found its way into Holland, and first of all in the persons of Hieronymus van Alphen (1746-1803) and Pieter Leonard van de Kastiele (1748-1810), who amused themselves by composing funeral poems of the school of Gessner and Blair. Van Alpheu at one time was extolled as a writer of verses for children, but neither in this nor in the elegiac line did he possess nearly so much talent as Feith. Rhijnvis Feith (1753-1824), burgomaster of Zwolle, the very type of a prosperous and sentimental Dutchman. In his Julia (1783), a prose romance, Feith proved himself as completely the disciple of Goethe in Werther as Wolff and Deken had been of Richardson in their Sara Burgerhart. In Johannes Kinker (1764-1845) a comic poet arose who, at the instigation of Bilderdijk, dedicated himself to the ridicule of Feith s sentimentalities. The same office was performed with more dignity and less vivacity by Baron W. E. van Perponcher (1741-1819), but Feith continued to hold the popular ear, and achieved an immense success with his poem The Grave, in 1792. He then produced tragedies for a while, and in 1803 published Antiquity, a didactic epic. But his popularity waned before his death, and he was troubled by the mirth of such witty scoffers as Arend Fokke Simons (1755-1812), the disciple of Klop- 97 stock, and as P. de Wacker van Zon (1758-1818), who, in a series of very readable novels issued under the pseudonym of Bruno Daalberg, sharply ridiculed the sentimental and funereal school. Under the Batavian republic an historian of great genius Van &amp;lt;l arose in the person of Johannes Henricus van der Palm Palm. (1763-1840). whose brilliant and patriotic GeJenkschrift van Nederlands Herstelling (1816) has somewhat obscured his great fame as a politician and an Orientalist. The work commenced by Van der Palm in prose was continued in verse by Cornelis Loots (1765-1834) and Jan Frederik Loota. Helmers (1767-1813). Loots, in his Batavians of the Time o/Ccesar (1805), read his countrymen a lesson in patriotism, which Helmers far exceeded in originality and force by his Dutch Nation in 1812. Neither of these poets, however, had sufficient art to render their pieces classical, or, indeed, enough to protect them during their lifetime from the sneers of Bilderdijk. Other political writers, whose lyrical energies were stimulated by the struggle with France, were Maurits Cornelis van Hall (1768-1858), Samuel Tperuszoon Wiselius (1769-1845), and Jan ten Brink (1771-1839), the second of whom immortalized himself and won the favour of Bilderdijk by ridiculing the pretensions of such frivolous tragedians as Shakespeare and Schiller. The healthy and national spirit in which the ladies Wolff and Deken had written was adopted with great spirit by a novelist in the next generation, Adriuau Loosjes (1761- Loosj 1818), a bookseller at Haarlem. His romantic stories of mediaeval life, especially his Charlotte van Bourbon, are curiously like shadows cast forward by the Waverley Novels, but he has little of Sir Walter Scott s historical truth of vision. His production was incessant and his popularity great for many years, but he was conscious all through that he was at best but a disciple of the authoresses of Sara Burgerhart. Another disciple whose name should not be passed over is Maria Jacoba de Neufville (177*5- 1856), author of Little Duties, an excellent story somewhat in the manner of Mrs Opie. A remarkable poet whose romantic genius strove to com- Tollei bine the power of Bilderdijk with the sweetness of Feith is Hendrik Tollens (1780-1856), whose verses have shown more vitality than those of most of his contemporaries. He struck out the admirable notion of celebrating the great deeds of Dutch history in a series of lyrical romances, many of which possess a lasting charm. Besides his folk-songs and popular ballads, he succeeded in a long descriptive poem, A Winter in Nova Zembla, 1819. He lacks the full accomplishment of a literary artist, but his inspiration was natural and abundant, and he thoroughly deserved the popularity with which his patriotic ballads were rewarded. Willem Messchert (1790-1844), a friend and follower of Mes- Tollens, pushed the domestic and familiar tone of the latter scheri to a still further point, especially in his genre poem of the Golden Wedding, 1825. Both these writers were natives and residents of Rotterdam, which also claims the honour of being the birthplace of Adrianus Bogaers (1795-1870), Bogn( the most considerable poetical figure of the time. Without the force and profusion of Bilderdijk, Bogaers has more truth to nature, more sweetness of imagination, and a more genuine gift of poetry than that clamorous writer, and is slowly taking a higher position in Dutch literature as Bilderdijk comes to take a lower one. Bogaers printed his famous poem Jochebed in 1835, but it had then been in existence more than thirteen years, so that it belongs to the second period of imaginative revival in Europe, and con nects the name of its author with those of Byron and Heine. Still more beautiful was his Voyage of Heemskerk to Gibraltar (1836), in which he rose to the highest level of his genius. In 1846 he privately printed his Romances and Ballads. Bogaers had a great objection to publicity, XII. i*