It is with the modern literature and literary movements of Holland, however, that these pages must concern themselves, and for practical purposes we may confine ourselves principally to the latter part of the completed century. For the early part of the nineteenth century was by no means prolific in literary achievement, and does not boast of many great names, if one disregards the writers whose lives linked that century with its predecessor, like Betjen Wolff and Agatha Deken. When, in 1814-15, Holland again became a separate kingdom, that important event failed to mark a new era in Dutch literature. Strange to say, though the political changes of the time powerfully influenced the sister arts of music and painting, which show strong traces of the transition of that crisis in the nation's history, upon literature they had no effect whatever. Before 1840 no very brilliant writers came to the front, though the period was not without notable names, such as Willem Bilderdijk, Hendrik C. Tollens, and Isaac da Costa, all of whom possessed a considerable vogue. Bilderdijk's chief claim to fame is the fact that he wrote over 300,000 lines of verse, and regarded himself as the superior of Shakespeare; Tollens had a name for rare patriotism, and wrote many fine historical poems and ballads; while Da Costa, who was a converted Jew, had to the last, in spite of a considerable popularity as a poet, to contend with the oftentimes fatal shafts of ridicule. A new period opened, however, about 1840, in the _Gids_ movement promoted by E.J. Potgieter and R.C. Bakhuizen van den Brink, who were editors of the _Gids_ and the severest of literary critics. The _Gids_ was the Dutch equivalent of the _Edinburgh Review_ under Jeffrey, and its criticisms were so much dreaded by the nervous Dutch author of the day that the magazine received the name of 'The Blue Executioner,' blue being the colour of its cover. If, however, Potgieter and Bakhuizen were unsparing in the use of the tomahawk, the service which they rendered to Dutch letters by their drastic treatment of crude and immature work was healthy and lasting in influence, for it undoubtedly raised the tone and standard of literary work, both in that day and for a long time to come, and so helped to establish modern Dutch literature on a firm basis. Perhaps the foremost figure in the literary revival which followed was Conrad Busken Huet, unquestionably the greatest Dutch critic of the last century, whose book 'Literary Criticisms and Fancies,' which contains a discriminating review of all writers from Bilderdijk forward, is essential to a thorough study of Dutch literature during the nineteenth century. Huet also emancipated literature from the orthodoxy in thought which had characterized the earlier Dutch writers, especially by his novel 'Lidewyde.'