Twelve Years’ Truce.  He did not live to bring the narrative further than the end of the Leicester regime.  In a small tower in the orchard at Muiden he kept his papers; and here, undisturbed, he spent all his leisure hours for nineteen years engaged on the great task, on which he concentrated all his energies.  He himself tells us of the enormous pains that he took to get full and accurate information, collecting records, consulting archives and submitting every portion as it was written to the criticism of living authorities, more especially to Constantine Huyghens and through him to the Prince of Orange himself.  Above all Hooft strove, to use his own words, “never to conceal the truth, even were it to the injury of the fatherland”; and the carrying-out of this principle has given to the great prose-epic that he wrote a permanent value apart altogether from its merits as a remarkable literary achievement.  And yet perhaps the most valuable legacy that Hooft has left to posterity is his collection of letters.  Of these a recent writer[7] has declared “that, though it could not be asserted that they [Hooft’s letters] threw into the shade the whole of the rest of Netherland literature, still the assertion would not be far beyond the mark.”  They deal with every variety of subject, grave and gay; and they give us an insight into the literary, social and domestic life of the Holland of his time, which is of more value than any history.

In these letters we find life-like portraits of the scholars, poets, dramatists, musicians, singers, courtiers and travellers, who formed that brilliant society which received from their contemporaries the name of the “Muiden Circle”—­Muidener Kring.  The genial and hospitable Drost loved to see around him those “five or six couple of friends,” whom he delighted to invite to Muiden.  Hooft was twice married; and both his wives, Christina van Erp and Heleonore Hellemans, were charming and accomplished women, endowed with those social qualities which gave an added attractiveness to the Muiden gatherings.  Brandt, Hooft’s biographer, describes Christina as “of surpassing capacity and intelligence, as beautiful, pleasing, affable, discreet, gentle and gracious, as such a man could desire to have”; while, of Heleonore, Hooft himself writes:  “Within this house one ever finds sunshine, even when it rains without.”

This reference to the two hostesses of Muiden calls attention to one of the noteworthy features of social life in the Holland of this period—­namely, the high level of education among women belonging to the upper burgher-class.  Anna and Maria Tesselschade Visscher, and Anna Maria Schuurman may be taken as examples.  Anna, the elder of the two daughters of Roemer Visscher (1584-1651), was brought up amidst cultured surroundings.  For some years after her mother’s death she took her place as mistress of the house which until 1620 had been the hospitable rendezvous of the literary society of Amsterdam.