Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/62

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
42
EUROPEAN LITERATURE—1600-1660.

which they are based, and have enjoyed, Alberdingk Thijm says, the fate of such songs—to be printed in various collections without the collector or printer knowing by whom they were composed.

It is impossible here to do more than mention the names of some of the poets of the second generation,Followers of
Vondel and
Hooft.
the followers and imitators of Hooft and Vondel. The pastoral and mythological conventions were generally rather clumsily handled in the song-books. The patriotic and laureate lyrics, into which Vondel put so much music and colour, were essayed with no great success by Reyer Ansloo[1] (1626-1669) and Gheeraerdt Brandt (1626-1685), more famous as a historian and biographer, whose Uitvaert van Hugo Groot and similar poems have a fair measure of rhetorical vigour; Joachim Oudaen (1628-1692); Johannes Vollenhove (1631-1708), whom Vondel called his son; and Johannes Antonides van der Goes (1647-1684), whose Ystroom is the most ambitious of these Vondelian pieces. But it needed all the ardour of Vondel's lyrical temperament to give vitality and interest to these long poems with their blend of matter-of-fact details and pedantic mythology.

The last poet whose verses have the naturalnessLuiken. and music of the best Dutch lyrical poetry was a disciple of Hooft rather than Vondel. In Jan Luiken's[2] Duytse Lier (1672) ends that

  1. Extracts from Ansloo, Brandt, &c., in Penon, op. cit., iv.
  2. Duitsche Lier opnieuw uitgegeven door Dr Maurits Sabbe, K. L. Pantheon.