Since his "Palamedes," Vondel, overwhelmed with his strange depression, had written but little. In 1630 he burst into a blaze of satire that swept the country like a whirlwind of flame. His poems of this year were entitled _Haec Libertatis Ergo_, and were of unsparing severity. "The evils of the time," said the poet, "are too deep-seated to be eradicated by a poultice of honey." Like Juvenal and Persius, he did not spare the knife, although he knew that every thrust only made his enemies more bitter and his own position more uncomfortable. His absolute fearlessness was the theme of admiration, not only among his friends, but even among his enemies. The higher the person, the stronger his invective; the more powerful the object of his dislike, the more cutting the edge of his sarcasm.
Never was satire so crushing and at the same time so keen; never mockery so unanswerable, polemic so overwhelming.
A Titan had thrown mountains of irony upon the heads of a thick-skulled generation of vipers. Their discomfiture was so complete that not even a hiss broke from the silence of their annihilation. The whited sepulchres of the sovereign hypocrites of the Republic now stood black as night in the face of noon.
Though a fiery patriot and an enthusiastic adherent of the House of Orange, Vondel received but little favor at the hands of Frederic Henry. This was probably due to the poet's unpopularity with the clergy, and to the hatred that he had excited among the Church party in power--the uncompromising Contra-Remonstrants, whose enmity the Stadholder would doubtless have incurred by an open friendship with aman whose avowed determination it was to accomplish their downfall.
About this time occurred the death of William van den Vondel, a younger brother of the poet, whom he loved most tenderly. This youth had been educated in France and Italy, and possessed extraordinary gifts and many accomplishments. He had also written some poems of great promise, but was now cut off in the flower of his youth by an insidious malady that he had brought with him from Italy, a sickness thought by many to have been due to poison.
The poet never ceased to mourn this idolized brother, and almost half a century later he was heard to say: "I could cry when I think of my brother. He was much my superior."