Gerbrand Adriansz Brederoo, strictly speaking, did not belong to that period.  He died prematurely in 1618, a victim while still young to a wayward life of dissipation and disappointment.  His comedies, written in the rude dialect of the fish-market and the street, are full of native humour and originality and give genuine glimpses of low life in old Amsterdam.  His songs show that Brederoo had a real poetic gift.  They reveal, beneath the rough and at times coarse and licentious exterior, a nature of fine susceptibilities and almost womanly tenderness.  Joost van den Vondel was born in the same year as Brederoo, 1587, but his career was very different.  Vondel survived till 1679, and during the whole of his long life his pen was never idle.  His dramas and poems (in the edition of Van Lennep) fill twelve volumes.  Such a vast production, as is inevitable, contains material of very unequal merit; but it is not too much to say that the highest flights of Vondel’s lyric poetry, alike in power of expression and imagery, in the variety of metre and the harmonious cadence of the verse, deserve a far wider appreciation than they have ever received, through the misfortune of having been written in a language little known and read.  Vondel was the son of an Antwerp citizen compelled as a Protestant to fly from his native town after its capture by Parma.  He took refuge at Cologne, where the poet was born, and afterwards settled at Amsterdam.  In that town Vondel spent all his life, first as a shopkeeper, then as a clerk in the City Savings’ Bank.  He was always a poor man; he never sought for the patronage of the great, but rather repelled it.  His scathing attacks on those who had compassed the death of Oldenbarneveldt, and his adhesion to the Remonstrant cause brought him in early life into disfavour with the party in power, while later his conversion to Catholicism—­in 1641—­and his eager and zealous advocacy of its doctrines, were a perpetual bar to that public recognition of his talents which was his due.  Vondel never at any time sacrificed his convictions to his interest, and he wrote poetry not from the desire of wealth or fame, but because he was a born poet and his mind found in verse the natural expression of its thought and emotions.

But, though Vondel was a poor man, he was not unlearned.  On the contrary he was a diligent student of Greek and Latin literature, and translated many of the poetical masterpieces in those languages into Dutch verse.  Indeed so close was his study that it marred much of his own work.  Vondel wrote a great number of dramas, but his close imitation of the Greek model with its chorus, and his strict adherence to the unities, render them artificial in form and lacking in movement and life.  This is emphasised by the fact that many of them are based on Scriptural themes, and by the monotony of the Alexandrine metre in which all the dialogues are written.  It is in the choruses that the poetical genius of Vondel is specially displayed.