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 the dramatic exhibitions; and the rhymed invitation to these was called a Charte, or Uitroep (outcry). Ketendichten (chain-poems) are short poems in which the last word of each line rhymes with the first of the line following; Scaekberd (checkerbourd), a poem of sixty-four lines, so rhymed, that in every direction it forms a strophe of eight lines; and Dobbel-steert (double-tail), a poem in which a double rhyme closes each line. [5]

“The example of Flanders was speedily followed by Zeeland and Holland.  In 1430, there was a Chamber at Middelburg; in 1433, at Vlaardingen; in 1434, at Nieuwkerk; and in 1437, at Gouda.  Even insignificant Dutch villages had their Chambers.  Among others, one was founded in the Lier, in the year 1480.  In the remaining provinces they met with less encouragement.  They existed, however, at Utrecht, Amersfoort, Leeuwarden, and Hasselt.  The purity of the language was completely undermined by the rhyming self-called Rhetoricians, and their abandoned courses brought poetry itself into disrepute.  All distinction of genders was nearly abandoned; the original abundance of words ran waste; and that which was left became completely overwhelmed by a torrent of barbarous terms.”

Wagenaer, in his “Description of Amsterdam,” gives a copy of a painter’s bill for work done for a rhetorician’s performance at the play-house in the town of Alkmaar, of which the following is a translation:—­

    “Imprimis, made for the Clerks a Hell;
    Item, the Pavilion of Satan;
    Item, two pairs of Devil’s-breeches;
    Item, a Shield for the Christian Knight;
    Item, have painted the Devils whenever they played;
    Item, some Arrows and other small matters. 
    Sum total; worth in all xii. guilders.

    “Jaques Mol.

    “Paid, October viii., 95 [1495].”

Among the Dutch pictures at the Louvre is an anonymous work representing the Committee of a Chamber of Rhetoric.

Roemer Visscher, the father of the poetess, was a leading rhetorician at Amsterdam, and the president of the Eglantine Chamber of the Brother’s Blossoming in Love (as he and his fellow-rhetoricians called themselves).  None the less, he was a sensible and clever man, and he brought up his three daughters very wisely.  He did not make them blue stockings, but saw that they acquired comely and useful arts and crafts, and he rendered them unique by teaching them to swim in the canal that ran through his garden.  He also was enabled to ensure for them the company of the best poetical intellects of the time—­Vondel and Brederoo, Spiegel, Hooft and Huyghens.