Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/32

12 "the man in the street," that we owe the evolution of modern prose.

Coornhert, Visscher, and Spieghel were men of more culture than genius. They differ from Marnix also in their attitude towards religion. All of them represent the growth in cultured circles, towards the close of the century, of a more liberal sentiment and a distaste of Calvinistic tyranny. Coornhert's life was spent in controversy, and his own independent position (he was dubbed a "libertine") was the outcome of the study of the Bible and the Fathers on the one hand, and the ancient philosophers on the other. He translated Boethius and Cicero's De Officiis, and composed an eclectic treatise on ethics, Zedekunst dat is Wellevenskunst (1586), in which Stoic morality is illumined by Christian faith, and which, as a piece of pure, clear, and often striking prose, stands next to Marnix's Byenkorf. Spieghel and Visscher were more entirely men of letters than Marnix and Coornhert. As Catholics—though liberal Catholics—they held aloof from public life, but they were both members of the Amsterdam Chamber of Rhetoric, known from its blazon as the "Eglantine." Since 1578 the Eglantine, known also as "De Oude Kamer," had been one of the most important of the chambers, and as