Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/66

46 narrative. It is impossible to read any of the greater episodes without recognising and admiring the vigour, the compression, the loftiness, and the fire with which Hooft tells his moving story. His deep interest in the events he narrates recalls Clarendon, but he is not so constantly the advocate of one side; and the condensation of his style and his frequent felicitous figures are more in the manner of Bacon in the Henry VII., although he has not the same detached interest in Macchiavelian kingcraft. A figure like that which follows is quite in Bacon's style: "But these considerations weighed little with that oppressor who had already set his heart upon the desolating of cities, the stamping out of liberty, and the confiscation of property. 'I have ere this,' said he, 'tamed a people of iron, and shall I not now be able to tame a people of butter?'  For he did not bethink him that hard metal may be hammered, but not soft curd, which he that would handle must deal gently withal." And the following might have come out of the essay Of Dissimulation: "Sparing of words indeed was this Prince, and wont to say that no craft of concealment can cover his steps that lets himself be taken a-prattling."

Of other prose work in the period there is not much to say. Attempts to imitate the French pastoral and heroic romance were unsuccessful. Hooft's dignified historical prose was most successfully cultivated by Gheeraert Brandt, whose poetry has been mentioned. The son of a watchmaker in Amsterdam, whose family, like Vondel's, came from