Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/43

Rh on condition that he would remain in Amsterdam and provide them with songs as required, for each of which he was to receive further two florins. Such a livelihood as Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson obtained from the theatre was not available for a Dutch poet where the actors were the members of the guilds, paid a small sum for their trouble, and a large part of the profits were handed over by the chambers to charitable institutions.

The education which his father denied him Vondel secured for himself, sharing to the full the opinion of his age, which his biographer Brandt lays down with emphasis, that no genius can dispense with learning and especially familiarity with the Greek and Latin poets, "that from their thyme they may suck honey." His earliest noteworthy works, a poem on the death of Henri IV. (1610), the finer Lofzang over de Scheepsvaert der vereenighde Nederlanden (1613), and the drama Het Pascha (1612), bear traces of his reading of Du Bartas—as popular in Holland as in England—and of Garnier's choruses. He was already grown-up and an author when he began the study of Latin, and later in life he acquired sufficient Greek to translate from that language with the help of more scholarly friends, and to recognise, to the advantage of his later plays, the superiority of the Greek tragedians to Seneca. His successive poems show the effect of his studies on his maturing art, but he never became a scholar such as Milton was, and it is not altogether to be regretted. He was not tempted to Latinise his idiom. The purity