del, Cats and Huyghens, the men whose names were to make the period
of Frederick Henry the most illustrious in the annals of Dutch
literature.

Gerbrand Adriansz Brederoo, strictly speaking, did not belong to that
period. He died prematurely in 1618, a victim while still young to a
wayward life of dissipation and disappointment. His comedies, written in
the rude dialect of the fish-market and the street, are full of native
humour and originality and give genuine glimpses of low life in old
Amsterdam. His songs show that Brederoo had a real poetic gift. They
reveal, beneath the rough and at times coarse and licentious exterior, a
nature of fine susceptibilities and almost womanly tenderness. Joost van
den Vondel was born in the same year as Brederoo, 1587, but his career
was very different. Vondel survived till 1679, and during the whole of
his long life his pen was never idle. His dramas and poems (in the
edition of Van Lennep) fill twelve volumes. Such a vast production, as
is inevitable, contains material of very unequal merit; but it is not
too much to say that the highest flights of Vondel's lyric poetry, alike
in power of expression and imagery, in the variety of metre and the
harmonious cadence of the verse, deserve a far wider appreciation than
they have ever received, through the misfortune of having been written
in a language little known and read. Vondel was the son of an Antwerp
citizen compelled as a Protestant to fly from his native town after its
capture by Parma. He took refuge at Cologne, where the poet was born,
and afterwards settled at Amsterdam. In that town Vondel spent all his
life, first as a shopkeeper, then as a clerk in the City Savings' Bank.
He was always a poor man; he never sought for the patronage of the
great, but rather repelled it. His scathing attacks on those who had
compassed the death of Oldenbarneveldt, and his adhesion to the
Remonstrant cause brought him in early life into disfavour with the
party in power, while later his conversion to Catholicism--in 1641--and
his eager and zealous advocacy of its doctrines, were a perpetual bar to
that public recognition of his talents which was his due. Vondel never
at any time sacrificed his convictions to his interest, and he wrote
poetry not from the desire of wealth or fame, but because he was a born
poet and his mind found in verse the natural expression of its thought
and emotions.

But, though Vondel was a poor man, he was not unlearn