increased; but when, on my way back, in a garden near Arnheim
I heard a nightingale, the treachery was complete.

And this reminds me that the best poem of the most charming figure in
Dutch literature--Tesselschade Visscher--is about the nightingale. The
story of this poetess and her friends belongs more properly to
Amsterdam, or to Alkmaar, but it may as well be told here while the
Arnheim nightingale--the only nightingale that I heard in Holland--is
plaining and exulting.

Tesselschade was the daughter of the poet and rhetorician Roemer
Visscher. She was born on 25th March, 1594, and earned her curious name
from the circumstance that on the same day her father was wrecked off
Texel. In honour of his rescue he named his daughter Tesselschade,
or Texel wreck, thereby, I think, eternally impairing his right to
be considered a true poet. As a matter of fact he was rather an
epigrammatist than a poet, his ambition being to be known as the
Dutch Martial. Here is a taste of his Martial manner:--

Jan sorrows--sorrows far too much: 'tis true
A sad affliction hath distressed his life;--
Mourns he that death hath ta'en his children two?
O no! he mourns that death hath left his wife.

I have said that Visscher was a rhetorician. The word perhaps needs
a little explanation, for it means more than would appear. In those
days rhetoric was a living cult in the Netherlands: Dutchmen and
Flemings played at rhetoric with some of the enthusiasm that we keep
for cricket and sport. Every town of any importance had its Chamber
of Rhetoric. "These Chambers," says Longfellow in his _Poets and
Poetry of Europe_, "were to Holland, in the fifteenth century, what
the Guilds of the Meistersingers were to Germany, and were numerous
throughout the Netherlands. Brussels could boast of five; Antwerp
of four; Louvain of three; and Ghent, Bruges, Malines, Middelburg,
Gouda, Haarlem, and Amsterdam of at least one. Each Chamber had its
coat of arms and its standard, and the directors bore the title
of Princes and Deans. At times they gave public representations
of poetic dialogues and stage-plays, called _Spelen van Sinne_,
or Moralities. Like the Meistersingers, they gave singular titles
to their songs and metres. A verse was called a _Regel_; a strophe,
a _Clause_; and a burden or refrain, a _Stockregel_. If a half-verse
closed as a strophe, it was a _Steert_, or tail. _Tafel-spelen_,
and _Spelen van Sinne_, were the titles of