land culture.

The senior member of the triumvirate, Dirk Volkertz Coornheert, led a
stormy and adventurous life. He was a devoted adherent of William the
Silent and for a series of years, through good and ill-fortune, devoted
himself with pen and person to the cause of his patron. As a poet he did
not attain any very high flight, but he was a great pamphleteer, and,
taking an active part in religious controversy, by his publications he
drew upon himself a storm of opposition and in the end of persecution.
He was, like his patron, a man of moderate and tolerant views, which in
an age of religious bigotry brought upon him the hatred of all parties
and the accusation of being a free-thinker. His stormy life ended in
1590. Hendrik Laurensz Spiegel (1549-1612) was a member of an old
Amsterdam family. In every way a contrast to Coornheert, Spiegel was a
Catholic. A prosperous citizen, simple, unostentatious and charitable,
he spent the whole of his life in his native town, and being
disqualified by his religion from holding public office he gave all his
leisure to the cultivation of his mind and to literary pursuits. The
work on which his fame chiefly rests was a didactic poem entitled the
_Hert-Spiegel_. In his pleasant country house upon the banks of the
Amstel, beneath a wide and spreading tree, which he was wont to call the
"Temple of the Muses" he loved to gather a circle of literary friends,
irrespective of differences of opinion or of faith, and with them to
spend the afternoon in bright congenial converse on books and men and
things. Roemer Visscher, the youngest member of the triumvirate, was
like Spiegel an Amsterdammer, a Catholic and a well-to-do merchant. His
poetical efforts did not attain a high standard, though his epigrams,
which were both witty and quaint, won for him from his contemporaries
the name of the "Second Martial." Roemer Visscher's fame does not,
however, rest chiefly upon his writings. A man of great affability,
learned, shrewd and humorous, he was exceedingly hospitable, and he was
fortunate in having a wife of like tastes and daughters more gifted than
himself. During the twenty years which preceded his death in 1620 his
home was the chosen rendezvous of the best intelligence of the day. To
the young he was ever ready to give encouragement and help; and
struggling talent always found in him a kindly critic and a sympathising
friend. He lived to see and to make the acquaintance of Brederoo,
Von