who have become critical even of Vondel's sources, and are not prepared to accept the execution of Saul's sons as an instance of Divine justice. The difficulty has led critics like Dr Jonckbloet to find political allegory in plays such as Gebroeders and Lucifer where the poet's devotional feeling would never have admitted it. And another barrier to the enjoyment of Vondel's plays as such is the not infrequently bourgeois tone of his piety. His characters are sometimes almost ludicrously unheroic in act and speech. The Dutch as a people have, it may be, no great love for the dramatically heroic—the fine point of honour, splendid but desolating passions. No nation has done more heroic deeds; none has cared less for mere glory in comparison with duty, material prosperity, and domestic happiness.
Vondel's plays are therefore not much read to-day, except by students and by generous lovers of poetry, Their lyrical
features. of which there is abundance, especially in the choral odes. The late Dr Nicholas Beets,[1] himself a poet, and the most humorous painter of Dutch life, has enumerated and illustrated the beauties of Vondel's choruses, and they are those of all his best lyric poetry, ardour and sweetness, fertility and subtlety of thought, learning and moral nobility, and with all and above all a music of verse which is at every turn the full and resonant counterpart of the feeling. In this, the supreme gift of the lyrical poet, possessed by Dutch poetry in an extraordinarily high degree, Vondel ex-
- ↑ Verscheidenheden, Haarlem, 1885.
