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Lucas, E. V. (Edward Verrall), 1868-1938

"A Wanderer in Holland"


Sum total; worth in all xii. guilders.
"Jaques Mol.
"Paid, October viii., 95 [1495]."

Among the Dutch pictures at the Louvre is an anonymous work
representing the Committee of a Chamber of Rhetoric.
Roemer Visscher, the father of the poetess, was a leading rhetorician
at Amsterdam, and the president of the Eglantine Chamber of the
Brother's Blossoming in Love (as he and his fellow-rhetoricians
called themselves). None the less, he was a sensible and clever man,
and he brought up his three daughters very wisely. He did not make
them blue stockings, but saw that they acquired comely and useful
arts and crafts, and he rendered them unique by teaching them to
swim in the canal that ran through his garden. He also was enabled
to ensure for them the company of the best poetical intellects of
the time--Vondel and Brederoo, Spiegel, Hooft and Huyghens.
Of these the greatest was Joost van den Vondel, a neighbour of
Visscher's in Amsterdam, the author of "Lucifer," a poem from which
it has been suggested that Milton borrowed. Like Izaak Walton Vondel
combined haberdashery with literature. Spiegel was a wealthy patron
of the arts, and a president, with Visscher, of the Eglantine Chamber
with the painfully sentimental name.


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