which did not exclude the composition of long didactic
Dramatic
activity. and narrative poems, as well as translations and lyrics in abundance. The number of his original tragedies—excluding translations—is twenty-three, of which only a few can be mentioned here, preliminary to a word or two on Vondel's tragic art generally.
The Maeghden, with which he followed up Gysbrecht in 1639, is practically a Miracle-play, on the traditional martyrdom of Saint Ursula at Cologne, and interests only by its Catholic and patriotic sentiment. Vondel's love of Cologne, the city of his birth, is beautifully expressed in one of the finest of his personal lyrics, the Olyftack aan Gustaaf Adolf (1632).
The Gebroeders of the same year handles with considerable dramatic power the difficult subject of the expiatory murder of Saul's sons, which attracted other dramatists of the Renaissance. Conflicting passions are portrayed with more than usual power, but the impression produced by the play as a whole is confused and weakened by the division of the author's sympathies as man and poet on the one hand, as pious exponent of the Bible on the other. Jonckbloet's theory, that in the person of the Archpriest, who persuades David to comply with the demand of the Gibeonites, Vondel was attacking the Calvinist clergy, is not admissible in view of the poet's religious and ecclesiastical sympathies at this stage. He approves David's act though he commiserates the victims. In the dedication to Vossius he places the conduct of David on a level with Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. David was
