It remains to speak of the man who may truly be described as the central figure among his literary contemporaries.  Pieter Cornelisz Hooft (1583-1647) was indisputably the first man of letters of his time.  He sprang from one of the first families of the burgher-aristocracy of Amsterdam, in which city his father, Cornelis Pietersz Hooft, filled the office of burgomaster no less than thirteen times.  He began even as a boy to write poetry, and his strong bent to literature was deepened by a prolonged tour of more than three years in France, Germany and Italy, almost two years of which were spent at Florence and Venice.  After his return he studied jurisprudence at Leyden, but when he was only twenty-six years old he received an appointment which was to mould and fix the whole of his future career.  In 1609 Prince Maurice, in recognition of his father’s great services, nominated Hooft to the coveted post of Drost, or Governor, of Muiden and bailiff of Gooiland.  This post involved magisterial and administrative duties of a by-no-means onerous kind; and the official residence of the Drost, the “High House of Muiden,” an embattled feudal castle with pleasant gardens, lying at the point where at no great distance from Amsterdam the river Vecht sleepily empties itself into the Zuyder Zee, became henceforth for thirty years a veritable home of letters.

Hooft’s literary life may be divided into two portions.  In the decade after his settlement at Muiden, he was known as a dramatist and a writer of pretty love songs.  His dramas—­Geerard van Velzen, Warenar and Baeto—­caught the popular taste and were frequently acted, but are not of high merit.  His songs and sonnets are distinguished for their musical rhythm and airy lightness of touch, but they were mostly penned, as he himself tells us, for his own pleasure and that of his friends, not for general publication.  There are, nevertheless, charming pieces in the collected edition of Hooft’s poems, and he was certainly an adept in the technicalities of metrical craft.  But Hooft himself was ambitious of being remembered by posterity as a national historian.  He aimed at giving such a narrative of the struggle against Spain as would entitle him to the name of “the Tacitus of the Netherlands.”  He wished to produce no mere chronicle like those of Bor or Van Meteren, but a literary history in the Dutch tongue, whose style should be modelled on that of the great Roman writer, whose works Hooft is said to have read through fifty-two times.  He first, to try his hand, wrote a life of Henry IV of France, which attained great success.  Louis XIII was so pleased with it that he sent the author a gold chain and made him a Knight of St Michael.  Thus encouraged, on August 19, 1628, Hooft began his Netherland Histories, and from this date until his death in 1647 he worked ceaselessly at the magnum opus, which, beginning with the abdication of Charles V, he intended to carry on until the conclusion of the