Meanwhile he was no better off materially.  The Duke of Brunswick, who had known him previously, received the famous Dutch exile with open arms, and granted him a pension; but it never sufficed.  Many efforts were made to have his decree of exile annulled; but they failed through his own peevish insolence and his boundless ingratitude.  King Louis (Bonaparte) of Holland extended his protection to the dissatisfied old poet; and all these royal gentlemen were most generous.  When the house of Orange returned to Holland, William I. continued the favor already shown him, obtained a high pension for him, and when it proved insufficient, supplemented it with gifts.  In this way Bilderdijk’s income in the year 1816 amounted to twenty thousand gold pieces.  That this should be sufficient to keep the wolf from the door in a city like Amsterdam, Bilderdijk thought too much to expect, and consequently left in great indignation and went to Leyden in 1817.

But these personal troubles in no way interfered with his talent.  On the contrary, the history of literature has seldom known so great an activity and productiveness; all in all, his works amounted to almost a hundred volumes.  What he accomplished during his stay in Germany was almost incredible.  He gave lessons to exiled Dutch in a great variety of branches, he saw volume upon volume through print; he wrote his famous ‘Het Buitenleven’ (Country Life) after Delille, he translated Fingal after Ossian, he wrote ‘Vaderlandsche Orangezucht’ (Patriotic Love for Orange).  After his return to Holland he wrote ‘De Ziekte der Geleerden’ (The Disease of Genius:  1817), ‘Leyden’s Kamp’ (Leyden’s Battle:  1808), and the first five songs of ‘De Ondergang der eerste Wereld’ (Destruction of the First World:  1809), probably his masterpiece; moreover, the dramas ‘Floris V.,’ ‘Willem van Holland,’ and ‘Kounak.’  The volumes published between 1815 and 1819 bore the double signature Willem and Wilhelmina Katherina Bilderdijk.

But it was as though time had left him behind.  The younger Holland shook its head over the old gentleman of the past century, with his antagonism for the poetry of the day and his rage against Shakespeare and the latter’s “puerile” ‘King Lear.’  For to Bilderdijk even more than to Voltaire, Shakespeare was an abomination.  Then in 1830 he received the severest blow of his life:  Katherina Wilhelmina died.  This happened in Haarlem, whither he had gone in 1827.  With this calamity his strength was broken and his life at an end.  He followed her in 1831.

He was in every way a son of the eighteenth century; he began as a didactic and patriotic poet, and might at first be considered a follower of Jakob Cats.  He became principally a lyric poet, but his lyric knew no deep sentiment, no suppressed feeling; its greatness lay in its rhetorical power.  His ode to Napoleon may therefore be one of the best to characterize his genius.  When he returned to his native country