the “Eglantine” weathered safely the perils and troubles of the Revolt, and passed in 1581 under the joint direction of a certain notable triumvirate, Coornheert, Spiegel and Visscher.  These men banded themselves together “to raise, restore and enrich” their mother-tongue.  But they were not merely literary purists and reformers; the “Eglantine” became in their hands and through their efforts the focus of new literary life and energy, and Amsterdam replaced fallen Antwerp as the home of Netherland culture.

The senior member of the triumvirate, Dirk Volkertz Coornheert, led a stormy and adventurous life.  He was a devoted adherent of William the Silent and for a series of years, through good and ill-fortune, devoted himself with pen and person to the cause of his patron.  As a poet he did not attain any very high flight, but he was a great pamphleteer, and, taking an active part in religious controversy, by his publications he drew upon himself a storm of opposition and in the end of persecution.  He was, like his patron, a man of moderate and tolerant views, which in an age of religious bigotry brought upon him the hatred of all parties and the accusation of being a free-thinker.  His stormy life ended in 1590.  Hendrik Laurensz Spiegel (1549-1612) was a member of an old Amsterdam family.  In every way a contrast to Coornheert, Spiegel was a Catholic.  A prosperous citizen, simple, unostentatious and charitable, he spent the whole of his life in his native town, and being disqualified by his religion from holding public office he gave all his leisure to the cultivation of his mind and to literary pursuits.  The work on which his fame chiefly rests was a didactic poem entitled the Hert-Spiegel.  In his pleasant country house upon the banks of the Amstel, beneath a wide and spreading tree, which he was wont to call the “Temple of the Muses” he loved to gather a circle of literary friends, irrespective of differences of opinion or of faith, and with them to spend the afternoon in bright congenial converse on books and men and things.  Roemer Visscher, the youngest member of the triumvirate, was like Spiegel an Amsterdammer, a Catholic and a well-to-do merchant.  His poetical efforts did not attain a high standard, though his epigrams, which were both witty and quaint, won for him from his contemporaries the name of the “Second Martial.”  Roemer Visscher’s fame does not, however, rest chiefly upon his writings.  A man of great affability, learned, shrewd and humorous, he was exceedingly hospitable, and he was fortunate in having a wife of like tastes and daughters more gifted than himself.  During the twenty years which preceded his death in 1620 his home was the chosen rendezvous of the best intelligence of the day.  To the young he was ever ready to give encouragement and help; and struggling talent always found in him a kindly critic and a sympathising friend.  He lived to see and to make the acquaintance of Brederoo, Vondel, Cats and Huyghens, the men whose names were to make the period of Frederick Henry the most illustrious in the annals of Dutch literature.