Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/65

Rh only in costly, brocaded robes. Hooft's model was Tacitus. Virgil he accounted, Brandt tells us, the first of Latin poets, Tacitus of historians and prose-writers. He had read his works fifty-two times, and had made at different periods of his life a complete translation of them. Following in the footsteps of his master, he prepared for his greater task by composing a Leven van Hendrik den Groote (1626), for which he was ennobled by Louis XI., and the Rampzaaligheden der Verheffinge van den Huize van Medicis (1649).

While he was thus elaborating his style, he was also gathering materials for his great work on the liberation of Holland. He spared no pains to arrive at the truth, and submitted the work as it proceeded to friends to be criticised. For the military portions especially he sought the help of qualified persons; and he endeavoured above all things to be just—to acknowledge the shortcomings of his countrymen and the virtues of the foe. The misfortune attending this elaboration is that the work was never finished, and that an unnecessary degree of artificiality was given to the style. The imaginary speeches delivered on critical occasions, after the manner of Thucydides and Tacitus, are the chief blots in the eye of a modern critic; but to a native ear Hooft's coinages—the result of his zeal for the purification of the language from words of French origin, his occasional harsh and too condensed constructions, his Latin idiom and sentence order—are more obvious. But these are flaws in a dignified and