A taste for religious writing prevailed in the Netherlands throughout the sixteenth century. William van Zuylen van Nyevelt first published a collection of the Psalms of David. These, in imitation of the French Calvinists, were sung to the most popular melodies. Zuylen found many imitators. The Catholic party composed songs in opposition to the Reformers; and we have psalms and songs by Utenhove, the painters Luc de Heere and Van Mander, by Van Haecht and Fruytiers. A long list of obscure names, if we except those of Marnix and Houwaert, is mentioned as belonging to this period,--their works mostly didactic or controversial. Houwaert, a Catholic, one of the avowed friends and partisans of the Prince of Orange, courted the Muses in the hottest days of civil strife. He published a poem, in sixteen cantos, entitled "The Gardens of the Virgins," tending to show the dangers to which the fair sex is exposed, and condemning as unreal all love not centred in God. With a remarkable fertility of composition he possesses an uncommon smoothness of versification, combined with a power, so successful in his age, of illustration from history or romance, from the sacred writings or the legendary lore of the people. The work was received in those days of trouble with unbounded enthusiasm. Brabant was thought to have given birth to a new Homer. His praises resounded in verse and song, and the young girls of Brussels crowned him with laurel.
The government of the Duke of Alva, and the succeeding years of revolution, were a period of desolation for Flanders. The Guilds of Rhetoric were dispersed; town after town was depopulated; Ghent, the loved city of Charles V., lost six thousand families; Leyden, Amsterdam, Haerlem, Gouda, afforded refuge to the emigrants. The golden age of literary activity is about to dawn in the Dutch republic. In the other provinces the national language is more and more neglected. It gives umbrage to the foreign chiefs who act as sovereigns. With it they identify all the opposition that has prevailed against them. Archduke Albert carries his condescension no farther than to address in High-German such of his subjects as can speak only Flemish. His Walloons he treats with no more civility, answering them but in Spanish or Latin. Ymmeloot, lord of Steenbrugge, a native of Ypres, endeavors in 1614 to stem the current of opposition and reawaken a love for letters. He suggests many reforms in the versification, and gives the example. He is followed by many, and Ypres becomes for a time a centre of versifiers. But the spirit of originality has flown, and the literature of Holland is enriched with the name of many a Fleming who preferred exile to the new rule.