Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/44

24 of Vondel's language is as much the boast of his people as its richness.

While the form of Vondel's poetry was modified by classical and other literary influences, its spirit was quickened by the events happening around him. Love of God and of his fellow-men was the inspiration of all Vondel's poetry; and he was still a young man, brought up in the particular sect of the Baptists known as the "Waterlanderen," when his sensitive and ardent nature was stirred to its depths by the conflict between the Calvinists and Arminians that ended in the Synod of Dort and the execution of Oldenbarneveldt. At what date some of his earliest satires were written is difficult to say, as they were not published at once. The condensed and pithy Op de Waegschael van Holland, beginning

"Gommar en Armijn te Hoof          Dongen om het recht geloof,"

and telling how Maurice's sword turned the scale, is assigned by Brandt to 1618, and the fiery Geuse Vesper may belong to the same time; but the first of his works which arrested attention, and may be said to inaugurate his active poetical career, was the Senecan tragedy Palamedes of Vermoorde Onnoozelheid, a veiled attack on the intolerance of the Calvinist preachers and the ambition of Prince Maurice, which had brought Oldenbarneveldt to the scaffold. The publication placed Vondel in considerable danger, from which he ultimately escaped with a fine; but it also indicated the appearance of a new and great