the century drew to a close, was much concerned about the purification of the language and the advance of rhetoric. Spieghel and Visscher were leading members, and their houses centres of literary culture. To Visscher's house an additional charm was given by his cultured daughters, Anna and Tesselschade, themselves much admired, if not really distinguished, poetesses, and the friends of Hooft and Huyghens, Brederoo and Vondel. Neither Visscher nor Spieghel was a great poet. Visscher's Brabbelingh (1614) and Sinne-en-Minnepoppen (1614) consist mainly of epigrams and poems of a half-humorous, half-didactic caste. Spieghel wrote some sonnets and songs which have a little of the grace of their Italian originals, but in later life he grew serious and composed moral and religious lyrics, as well as an elaborate ethical poem in Alexandrines—Hert-spieghel—didactic, even prosaic, in spirit, harsh and obscure in style.
Thus by the close of the sixteenth century the study of classical and Italian literature had done much for the purification of the language, and had quickened a desire for improvement in style and verse. But poetry was still didactic and heavy: no artist had yet appeared to do for Dutch poetry what Spenser by The Shepheardes Kalender did for English in 1579,—no poet capable of transplanting the flower of Renaissance poetry from Italian or French soil and naturalising it in Holland. But the seventeenth century had not long to wait before such a poet appeared in Pieter Cornelisz
