Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/31

Rh were Philip van Marnix van St Aldegond, the fiery Calvinistic statesman and friend of William the Silent, Dirck Volckertz. Coornhert (1522-1590), Henrick Laurensz. Spieghel (1549-1612), and Roemer Visscher.

Of these Marnix was the greatest. He was a man of culture, ardent faith, and ardent patriotism, and at the same time stood outside the circle of the chambers. The Wilhelmuslied, the most famous of the "Geuzenliederen," is probably by him, and his metrical version of the Psalms marks the highest level reached by Dutch poetry in the sixteenth century. The rhythm and stanza-structure is in each adapted to the feeling of the psalm in a manner which is characteristic of Dutch lyrical poetry in the following century:—

"Straf doch niet in ongenaden            Mijn misdaden,        Heer! maer heb met mij gedult!       Wil niet zynd in toom ontsteken,            Aen my wreken        Mijne sonde en sware schuldt."

De Byenkorf der Heiligh Roomsche Kerk (1569), a savage satire on the Church of Rome, is the first work in which Dutch prose showed itself an instrument of sufficient power and pliability to do the work hitherto assigned to Latin. In Holland, as in France and England, it is to the Reformation's requirement of a polemic, addressed not only to scholars but to