Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/55

Rh almost as prolific a composer in French and Latin as in Dutch. He tried his hand, like Milton, at Italian verses, and he translated from Guarini and Marino, as well as some thirteen hundred Spanish proverbs and about twenty of Donne's songs and elegies. Huyghens visited England three or four times in the service of his country, was knighted by James, and seems to have seen something of English men of letters at the house of Sir Robert Killigrew.

For his courtly and politer poetry Huyghens used French by preference. His French poems are quite in the affected, Marinistic, complimentary vein of the day. In Dutch his tone becomes more homely, his style more masculine,—not without affectations, but affectations which recall Jonson and Donne rather than Marino. He used his native language to correspond in playful and delightful verses with intimate friends, such as Hooft and Tesselschade Visscher, and to compose epigrams and longer poems of a satiric, didactic, and reflective character. The Otia (1625) included poems in various languages. In the Koren-bloemen (flowers gathered from among the grain of a busy life), published towards the close of his long life (1672), he collected his Dutch poems alone in twenty-seven books. Of these, fifteen contain epigrams (Sneldichten), one translations, two lighter lyrics and epistles. The longer poems include &#x27;t Kostelyck Mal (1622), a satire on the dress of the day in the usual Alexandrines; &#x27;t Voorhout (1621), a fresh and sparkling eulogy of the forest outside The Hague, written in stanzas of eight trochaic