To a comparatively small country like Holland the use of Latin as an international language of scholarshipLatin Prose. was an even more obvious convenience than to larger countries. The most distinguished Hollander of the Renaissance, Erasmus, is not thought of as a Dutch author, and the same is true, in a somewhat less degree, of several notable Dutchmen of the seventeenth century, distinguished not only by their learning but by their contributions to the belles lettres of humanism, such as Daniel Heinsius, Isaac Vossius, and Hugo Grotius. Both Heinsius and Grotius wrote some poems in their native tongue, but their fame rests on their Latin lyrics and tragedies, and still more securely on the treatises of the former on criticism, of the latter on international law. Grotius, indeed, was one of the great men of the century, and were this primarily a history of thought and scholarship would require specially full treatment. In the present chapter he must yield to those who cultivated their native tongue.
The principal writer of artistic prose in the earlier seventeenth century—the successor of Coornhert in theDutch—Hooft. modelling of Dutch upon Latin prose—was Hooft. To the writing of prose Hooft brought all, and more than all, the careful study and elaborate art which he bestowed upon his poems. Some of his letters to his friends show that he could write in a simple and playful style, though in general they, too, smell of the lamp. But the stately Muse of History was to be served in the seventeenth century
