Fleet Prison.

No doubt the passage referred to by the Dutch poet is to be found in Baker's Meditations and Disquisitions, a somewhat uncommon theological work, to which the present writer has had no opportunity of referring.

Its

The Lucifer was not received very favourably in Holland. It was true that the violent and internecine strife of the two great religious parties, the burning and parching zeal to which the noble Barneveld had fallen a victim thirty years before, had in a great measure cooled down. But still fanatic rage ran very high in the United Provinces, and one attack after another was made upon "the false imaginations," "hellish fancies," and "irregular and unscriptural devices" of Vondel's beautiful drama. An effort was made in February 1654 to prevent the representation of "the tragedy made by Joost van den Vondel, named Luisevar, treating in a fleshly manner the high theme of God's mysteries." When this fell through, and the piece had been acted, a still more strenuous effort was made to prevent the printing and to prohibit the sale; but at last, through a perfect sea of invective and obloquy, the poem sailed safe in the haven of recognised literature. political significance, real or imagined, gave it no doubt an interest that counterbalanced its supposed sins against theology. It was considered—— and the idea has received the support of most modern Dutch critics— that in Lucifer Vondel desired to give an allegorical account of the rising of the Netherlands against Philip II. According to this theory, God was represented by the King of Spain, Michael by the Duke of Alva, Adam by the Cardinal Granvella, and Lucifer by the first stadholder, William the Silent, who was murdered in 1584. There are several difficulties in the way of consenting to this belief in the first place, the incidents occurred more than seventy years before the writing of the poem ; and secondly, the event of the one rebellion was diametrically opposed to that of the other. William of Orange, indeed, was murdered by a hired assassin, but not until he had secured the independent existence of the new State; and there would be a curious inappropriateness in describing the popular hero as a fallen and defeated angel thrust into hell. There is, however, another theory of the political signification of the Lucifer, which seems to me much more plausible. It is that which sees in the figure of the rebel archangel the still dominant prince of the English Commonwealth, Cromwell, the enemy of Holland, and in the God and the Michael of Vondel's drama, Charles I. and Laud still surviving in their respective successors. Considered as a prophecy of the approaching downfall of the still flourishing English Republic, the allegory has a force and a spirited coherence that are entirely lacking in the generally received version.

If Milton had preserved his original design, it is probable that the resemblance of his poem to Vondel's tragedy would have been still greater than it is. In the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, are, or were, two draughts of Milton's first scheme for Paradise Lost, and

they show that his earliest intention was to treat the theme in a dramatic form. It is strange that in this day of incessant reproduction and republication these most interesting documents have never been presented to the public. It would be exceedingly interesting to note in what form the essentially epic story of the Fall of Man originally impressed the imagination of Milton before his unerring instinct for art led him on the better way.

To return to Vondel and the Dutch drama, we find that the veteran poet survived the production of his Lucifer by a quarter of a century, dying five years after Milton, though more than twenty years his senior. Almost till the day of his death he laboured at the improvement of the literature of his country. But he had the mortification, whilst outliving every one of his great contemporaries, whether in poetry or philosophy-for even Spinoza, the last great Dutchman, died before him-of seeing the romantic and lyric practice of his youth entirely set aside in favour of the rhetorical and artificial manner of the French, which, spreading over Europe like a plague, did not spare the literature of Holland, and this in spite of the Forty Years' War and all the personal hatred for France. In the year 1672, the poet Antonides, the last friend of Vondel, and lover of the old school, lamented that the whole literature of his country had become the ape of the French; and by the time of Vondel's death this sterile rhetoric had deformed every branch of letters and learning. A history of the lifetime of Joost van den Vondel is a chronicle of the whole rise and decline of the literature of Holland.

E. W. G.

My Neighbour's life!

HARK! Hark to my neighbour's flute!
Yon powder'd slave, that ox, that ass are his :
Hark to his wheezy pipe; my neighbour is
A worthy sort of brute.

My tuneful neighbour's rich-has houses, lands,
A wife (confound his flute-a handsome wife!):
Hor love must give a gusto to his life.

See yonder-there she stands.

She turns, she gazes, she has lustrous eyes,
A throat like Juno, and Aurora's arms—
Per Bacco, what a paragon of charms!

My neighbour's drawn a prize.

Yet, somehow, life's a nuisance with its woes, Sin and disease-and that eternal preaching: We've suffer'd from our early pious teachingWe suffer-goodness knows.

How vain the wealth that breeds its own vexation,

Yet few appear to care to quite forego it!

Then weariness of life (and many know it)
Isn't a glad sensation :

And therefore, neighbour mine, without a sting I contemplate thy fields, thy house, thy flocks;

I covet not thy man, thine ass, thine ox,

Thy flute, thy-anything.