The Chambers of Rhetoric reached their climax in a time of fermentation.  The impatience, the feeling of uneasiness and restraint, is felt in the drama of these days, which was wholly under the control of the Chambers.  The stage, that “mirror of the times,” is often the first manifestation of the unquiet heaving and subsequent up-bubbling in the fluid compost of the mass that constitutes a nation.  When freely developed, it is the pulse-beat of the people.  And so, throughout the Netherlands, at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, we find the allegorical drama giving way to more definite and direct personations.  Those cold representations of vices and virtues, of vice in its nakedness, such as to render the reading, when not absolutely tedious, distasteful, to say the least, to our modern ideas,—­all such aimless productions were giving way to the conscious expression of satire.  Diatribes against prevalent abuses, personal invectives scarcely veiled, were fast becoming the order of the day.  It is no wonder, then, that the guilds, which had found favor formerly, should gradually be crushed, in proportion as the rulers sought to check the spirit of reform.  Among the authors of this period may be mentioned Everaert and Machet.  The refrain was much cultivated, and not, like the drama, for the expression of dissatisfaction.  Anna Byns, an oracle with the Catholic party, wrote when the language was in its most degenerate state, under Margaret of Austria.  She was styled the Sappho of Brabant, though her poems are all religious.  They were translated into Latin, and were read as masterpieces till the middle of the last century.

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.