Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/40

20 and describing how a peasants' meeting for jollification ended in drawn knives and blood, has the swing and animation of a poem by Burns, the spirit of a picture by Jan Steen. None of the others are quite so vigorous, but there are some admirable pieces of peasant moralising on themes familiar to readers of Burns, as "What can a young lassie do wi' an auld man?" the comparative claims of love and a comfortable "tocher," and the dangers of rejecting too often some ardent Duncan Gray. The simpler love-poems, too, written in a frank peasant strain, are often excellent, passionate, and flowing.

Equally gay and fresh—if never showing quite the same passion and descriptive vigour—are the songs of the Dutch poet of English birth, Jan Janszen Starter, who, born in London of Brownist parents, was a member of the "Oude Kamer," but spent several years of his wandering irregular life at Leeuwarden in Friesland, and at Franeker. He finally enlisted with Mansfeld, and seems to have died worn out on a march some time before 1628. He was a dramatist and a facile writer of occasional verses—epithalamia, songs on victories, visits, deaths, &c., as well as love- and drinking- ditties. His employment of the courtly conventions is, of course, less graceful than Hooft's, but his gayer love-poems and his drinking-songs are spirited and