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28 large sums entrusted to his care. The aged poet came to the rescue, and with the savings of a lifetime cleared his name. Left thus penniless, he was granted a post in the Amsterdam Mont de Piété, from which he was allowed to retire on his full salary after ten years' service. He made no complaint, his biographer says, and there is no reference to the circumstances in his work such as we find to Milton's private as well as public misfortunes in Samson Agonistes. Vondel had not the sublime egotism of Milton, and his religion was more essentially Christian. He was, like the English poet, a good hater, but his nature was less stern. His hatred of the Gomarists was the reflection from his love of God and his fellow-men, a detestation of the intolerance which brought a father of his country to the scaffold, and of a doctrine which, stated with the logical severity of the seventeenth century, seemed to him an outrage on God and the human heart. But he could no more have written some of the fiercest passages of Milton's episcopal pamphlets than he could have attained to the stern and majestic sublimity of Paradise Lost. Vondel's highest flights are on the wings of adoration and love, and recall Crashaw rather than Milton.

Born more than twenty years before Milton, Vondel outlived him by five, dying in 1679, the acknowledged head of Dutch poets, yet alienated to some extent from his people by his change of faith, and never so widely popular as the homely and garrulous Cats.