Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/26

6 de la Rose, the tone of the second part of which is that of this cultured middle class, was translated in the fourteenth century by Hein van Aken.

The same century produced abundance of short tales or sproken, a few courtly, very many didactic, and some in the humorous popular vein of the French fabliau. They were recited in banqueting halls by the Sprekers or Zeggers, and many of the more humorous and coarse of them have probably been lost. A collection of stories, serious and humorous, very much in the style of Gower's Confessio Amantis, from which indeed the Dutch poet borrows, was made by Dirk Potter (1370-1428) under the title Minnenloop. Potter, like Chaucer, visited Italy, but he learnt nothing from Italian poetry, and stands much closer to Gower and Cats than to the author of the Canterbury Tales. To the fourteenth century belong also the oldest extant Dutch songs, ballads, and love-poems, such as the famous Het daget in den Oosten, Halewijn, Graaf Floris, Een liedeken vanden Mey, De Leeuwerik, and others. The lyrics of Zuster Hadewijch—in which the language of the Minnesingers is employed to express a mystical passion for Christ—belong to the thirteenth century. Other religious songs are the charming Kerstliederen or Christmas songs, the Maria-liederen, and the Liederen der Minnende Ziele. No part of Mediæval Dutch or Flemish literature is more entirely delightful than the songs.

The centres or nuclei of literature in the Low Countries during the fifteenth and sixteenth