Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/28

8 The loosely rhythmical metre easily passes into doggerel. The best lyrics of the sixteenth century are not those of the "rederijkers," but the people's songs or "volksliederen," which handled the old courtly themes in a more free and homely spirit. In the second half of the sixteenth century these songs became, as in the famous "Geuzenliederen," the most potent expression of religious and political sentiment. The war-songs of the English Puritans a century later were the Psalms of David. The Dutch Calvinists expressed their feelings more directly in simple and moving descriptions of the sufferings of martyrs to the cause, and in fierce onslaughts upon Philip and the Pope. It was the spirit of an unconquerable people which breathed in their rude verses:—

"Help now yourself and you shall see      God from the tyrant set you free,           Oppressèd Netherland!       The rope that's round your neck must be           Torn by your own right hand."

The national anthem of Holland is still the grave and resolute—

"Wilhelmus van Nassouwen          ben ik van duytschen bloed:       Het vaterland getrouwe           blijf ik tot in den dood."

It is impossible, and hardly necessary, to mention individual "Rederijkers," even the fairly important Matthijs de Casteleyn (1488?-1550), author of a Const van Rhetoriken, in which, using the common device of a dream, he gives rules for the