ons of the French
and the English authors. Nations display _genius_ before they form
_taste_.

It was the mode with English and French writers to dishonour the Germans
with the epithets of heavy, dull, and phlegmatic compilers, without
taste, spirit, or genius; genuine descendants of the ancient Boeotians,

Crassoque sub aeere nati.

Many imaginative and many philosophical performances have lately shown
that this censure has now become unjust; and much more forcibly answers
the sarcastic question of Bohours than the thick quarto of Kramer.

Churchill finely says of genius that it is independent of situation,

And may hereafter even in HOLLAND rise.

Vondel, whom, as Marchand observes, the Dutch regard as their AEschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, had a strange defective taste; the poet
himself knew none of these originals, but he wrote on patriotic
subjects, the sure way to obtain popularity; many of his tragedies are
also drawn from the Scriptures; all badly chosen and unhappily executed.
In his _Deliverance of the Children of Israel_, one of his principal
characters is the _Divinity_! In his _Jerusalem Destroyed_ we are
disgusted with a tedious oration by the angel Gabriel, who proves
theologically, and his proofs extend through nine closely printed pages
in quarto, that this destruction has been predicted by the prophets;
and, in the _Lucifer_ of the same author, the subject is grossly
scandalised by this haughty spirit becoming stupidly in love with Eve,
and it is for her he causes the rebellion of the evil angels, and the
fall of our first parents. Poor Vondel kept a hosier's shop, which he
left to the care of his wife, while he indulged his poetical genius.
His stocking-shop failed, and his poems produced him more chagrin than
glory; for in Holland, even a patriotic poet, if a bankrupt, would, no
doubt, be accounted by his fellow-citizens as a madman. Vondel had no
other master but his genius, which, with his uncongenial situation,
occasioned all his errors.

Another Dutch poet is even less tolerable. Having written a long
rhapsody concerning Pyramus and Thisbe, he concludes it by a ridiculous
parallel between the death of these unfortunate victims of love, and the
passion of Jesus Christ. He says:--

Om t'concluderem van onsen begrypt,
Dees Historie moraliserende,
Is in den verstande wel accorderende,
By der Passie van Christus gebenedyt.

And upon this, after having turned Pyr