Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/67

Rh Antwerp, Brandt was at seventeen the author of a tragedy, and at twenty he composed a funeral oration on the death of Hooft, which was recited by an actor in the theatre and received with immense applause. As a fact, the speech was simply a translation of Du Perron's Oraison Funèbre for Ronsard. Later, when he had left watchmaking and become a Predikant, he composed his Historie van de Reformatie (1668-74), the second part of which, dealing with the Arminian controversy, provoked the bitter hostility of the Calvinists. He composed short and sympathetic biographies of Hooft and Vondel for editions of their works, and a Leven van de Ruiter (1687), which is the finest example of his prose.

Brandt's model is quite clearly the dignified prose of Hooft with its elaborate periods. "The perception of this," he begins his Life of Van Ruiter, "and the utility for the state involved, has moved me to devote some of my hours to the description of his praiseworthy life and valiant achievements, with the firm purpose in this work, which may God bless, of confining myself strictly within the bounds prescribed by the supreme law for historians, and, in the service of truth alone, of narrating as well the errors of friends as the praise of enemies; ever bearing in mind that I write not of olden times whose memory has grown dim, but of things that happened but yesterday, and, as it were, under the eyes of many who took part in them, assisting or being present, friends and strangers, who without doubt should I, in this wide sea of manifold events, wander