nd.
This post involved magisterial and administrative duties of a
by-no-means onerous kind; and the official residence of the Drost, the
"High House of Muiden," an embattled feudal castle with pleasant
gardens, lying at the point where at no great distance from Amsterdam
the river Vecht sleepily empties itself into the Zuyder Zee, became
henceforth for thirty years a veritable home of letters.

Hooft's literary life may be divided into two portions. In the decade
after his settlement at Muiden, he was known as a dramatist and a writer
of pretty love songs. His dramas--_Geerard van Velzen, Warenar_ and
_Baeto_--caught the popular taste and were frequently acted, but are not
of high merit. His songs and sonnets are distinguished for their musical
rhythm and airy lightness of touch, but they were mostly penned, as he
himself tells us, for his own pleasure and that of his friends, not for
general publication. There are, nevertheless, charming pieces in the
collected edition of Hooft's poems, and he was certainly an adept in the
technicalities of metrical craft. But Hooft himself was ambitious of
being remembered by posterity as a national historian. He aimed at
giving such a narrative of the struggle against Spain as would entitle
him to the name of "the Tacitus of the Netherlands." He wished to
produce no mere chronicle like those of Bor or Van Meteren, but a
literary history in the Dutch tongue, whose style should be modelled on
that of the great Roman writer, whose works Hooft is said to have read
through fifty-two times. He first, to try his hand, wrote a life of
Henry IV of France, which attained great success. Louis XIII was so
pleased with it that he sent the author a gold chain and made him a
Knight of St Michael. Thus encouraged, on August 19, 1628, Hooft began
his _Netherland Histories_, and from this date until his death in 1647
he worked ceaselessly at the _magnum opus_, which, beginning with the
abdication of Charles V, he intended to carry on until the conclusion of
the Twelve Years' Truce. He did not live to bring the narrative further
than the end of the Leicester regime. In a small tower in the orchard at
Muiden he kept his papers; and here, undisturbed, he spent all his
leisure hours for nineteen years engaged on the great task, on which he
concentrated all his energies. He himself tells us of the enormous pains
that he took to get full and accurate information, collecting records,
consulting archives and