Annie Foore.
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX OF WRITERS.
Buning, Arnold Werumeus, born at Uithuizen (Groningen), in 1846, and served in the Dutch navy from 1861 to 1876, when he was forced by ill-health to retire on a pension. He then settled in his native town, but afterwards removed to the Hague, where he now lives. He is the author of a great number of short stories, mostly more or less naval, and one or more novels, of which the principal is “The Burgomaster’s Inheritance” (Leyden, 1873), and frequently contributes to Eigen Haard and Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift. He is not remarkable for the subtleties of humour, his genius being more akin to the rattling fun and boisterous spirits of such writers as Captain Marryat and the late Henry Kingsley. But he can be touching too, and there is unaffected pathos as well as fun in the little volume, “Marim-Schetsen,” from which our extract is taken. The education of the orphan boy by his father’s old mate, “The Red ’Un,” who trains him up with unsparing rigour in the way in which all good sailors should go, is good in both ways; so is the sketch (in Verschillende Ouwe Heeren) of old Jan Hallema, the Hilligermond pilot.
Cats, Jacob,[[46]] born at Brouwershaven, in Zeeland, 1577; died September 12, 1660; and was buried in the Kloosterkerk at the Hague. He studied law at Leyden, and then travelled in France and Italy. Returning, he practised as a lawyer in his native town for some years. His health gave way, and he visited England in order to consult Dr William Butler, at Cambridge, but received no benefit. He went home to die, but was unexpectedly cured by a strolling alchemist. He then settled at Middleburgh, and married. His profession seems to have left him abundant leisure for poetry, and for enjoying the society of his family at his country place of Grypskerke. It was during this period he produced his “Emblems of Fancy and Love,” “Galatea,” “Mirror of Past and Present,” and “Marriage” (Houwelick). In 1621 he was appointed Pensionary (stipendiary magistrate) of Middleburgh, and in 1623 transferred to the same office at Dordrecht. In 1627 he was sent on a diplomatic mission to England, and knighted by Charles I. After his return he lost his wife, and dedicated to her memory the Trouwringh (“Wedding Ring”), published in 1635. In 1636 he was chosen Grand Pensionary of Holland, resigned his office in 1651, and in 1657 went on another unsuccessful embassy to England, where he delivered a Latin oration before the House of Commons. On coming back to Holland he retired to his villa of Zorgvliet, near the Hague, where he devoted himself once more to farming and poetry, and died at the age of seventy-three. He has always been a most popular writer in Holland, his mixture of canny morality and shrewd homely wit being in thorough accordance with the national genius, which found his long-windedness no drawback. His reputation for “soundness,” and his tendency to preach also, no doubt secured his popularity among a nation peculiarly suspicious of heterodoxy, frivolity, and anything “without a moral at the end,” though it must be said that his notions of propriety appear to be somewhat large when judged by present-day standards. It may seem difficult to believe, after all this, that he possessed the faintest spark of humour; but his shrewd mother wit makes him sometimes amusing, even to an outsider, and now and then he records a touch of that “detached outlook in life, which goes to the making of a real humorist.” Southey, who read Dutch among other things, and was probably introduced to a great deal of Dutch literature by the poet Bilderdijk, has a highly complimentary reference to him in the epistle to Allan Cunningham:
... “Father Cats,
The household poet, teacheth in his songs
The love of all things lovely, all things pure.
Best poet, who delights the cheerful mind
Of childhood, stores with moral strength the heart