Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/103

Rh growth, the farce, the coarseness and general slack morality of which shows how much of a popular growth it continued to be. One of Brederoo's closest imitators was Willem Diederickz. Hooft, author of five farcical pieces; but the best writers of comedy and farce in the latter years of the century were Dr Pieter Bernagie (1650-1699), who wrote some fifteen tragedies and comedies, "free and natural pictures of the native manners of his time," which have not yet disappeared from the stage, and Thomas Asselijn, whose Jan Klaaszen (1682), Stiefmoer (1684), Stiefvaar (1690), and Spilpenning (1690), are brilliant comic pictures of life and manners in the last days of the century. Jan Klaaszen of Gewaande Dienstmaagd is his masterpiece, inferior in comic spirit to Brederoo's best work, but superior in construction, owing, doubtless, in some measure to the beneficial influence of Molière. Asselijn and Langendijk, who followed, lie somewhat outside the period covered in this volume.