Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/42

22 and a lyric inspiration as deep and full as that possessed by any poet of the seventeenth century. Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) was by birth a South Netherlander, which probably explains in part the peculiar ardour of his temperament. His parents were natives of Antwerp, pious Baptists, who were driven by religious persecution to Cologne, where the poet was born in the year, as he said, of the murder of Mary. While he was still a child they migrated to Utrecht and finally to Amsterdam, where his father soon acquired a considerable business in the stocking trade. Vondel's brother received a classical education, but he himself was bred to his father's business—a circumstance, as it proved, by no means unfortunate. The stocking trade conducted by his wife secured him a competence such as he could never have gained from poetry or plays. The only remuneration which the former brought to a Dutch poet were gifts from corporations or individuals, made in return for occasional poems, as epithalamia, poems on victories and state-entries, and others of the kind that the chambers had cultivated. Starter was offered a fixed sum by a group of