Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/59

Rh. Like Huyghens, he was an ardent Calvinist, and had come under the influence of English "pietism," which had taken root in Zeeland.

Cats was a voluminous poet. Beginning with Emblems,—all the Dutch poets wrote Emblems,—he poured forth poems in a didactic strain, and written in a monotonous Alexandrine couplet, of which the best known are Houwelick (1625) and &#x27;s Werelts Begin, Midden, Eynde besloten in den Trou-ring (1634). He is as profoundly interested in the subject of marriage as Coventry Patmore; but if the latter occasionally approaches Cats in his descent to homely details, Cats has none of Patmore's delicacy of feeling and soaring flights. Practical advice, enforced by diffusely narrated stories—not always of the chastest, for as the moral is coming to set all right, why omit piquant details?—prattle about himself, these are the staple of Cats' poems. His language is pure, and many of his proverbial sayings have passed into current use, but his work is of interest for the student of national thought and morality rather than of literature.

There is much greater depth of feeling and music of verse in the Stichtelyke Rymen of another religious poet, Dirk Rafaelsz Camphuysen (1586-1627). Born at Gorkum, educated at Leyden, a teacher for some time at Utrecht, he became a "predikant," and was for a short time an exceedingly popular preacher in Vleuten. But his sympathies