What Douwes Dekker and Busken-Huët did in prose, was effected in poetry by Carel Vosmaer. This estimable man, who died in 1888, was well known throughout Europe as an art-critic and an authority on Rembrandt. In Holland he was pre-eminent as the soul of a literary newspaper, the _Nederlandsche Spectator_, which took an independent line in literary criticism, and affected to lead public taste in directions less provincial and old-fashioned than the rest of the Dutch press. Vosmaer wrote also several volumes of more or less fantastic poetry, a translation of Homer into alexandrines, and an antiquarian novel, _Amazone_,1881. But Vosmaer's position was, above all, that of a precursor. He, and he alone, saw that a new thing must be made in Dutch poetical literature. He, and he alone, was not satisfied with the stereotyped Batavian tradition. At the same time Vosmaer was not, it may be admitted, strong enough himself to found a new school; perhaps even, in his later days, the Olympian calm which he affected, and a certain elegant indolence which overcame him, may have made him unsympathetic to the ardent and the juvenile. At all events, this singular phenomenon has occurred. He who of all living Dutchmen was, ten or fifteen years ago, fretting under the poverty of thought and imagination in his fatherland and longing for the new era to arrive, is at this moment the one man of the last generation who is most exposed to that unseemly _ferocité des jeunes_ which is the ugliest feature of these esthetic revolutions. I have just been reading, with real pain, the violent attack on Vosmaer and his influence which has been published by that very clever young poet, Mr. Willem Kloos (_De Nieuwe Gids_, December 1890). All that cheers me is to know that the whirligig of time will not forget its revenges, and that, if Mr. Kloos only lives long enough, he will find somebody, now unborn, to call _him_ a "bloodless puppet." Of one other representative of the transitional period, Marcellus Emants, I need say little. He wrote a poem, _Lilith_, and several short stories. Much was expected of him, but I know not what has been the result. The inaugurator of the new school was Jacques Perk, a young poet of indubitable genius, who was influenced to some degree by Shelley, and by the _Florence_ of the Dutch Browning, Potgieter. He wrote in 1880 a _Mathilde_, for which he could find no publisher, presently died, and began to be famous on the posthumous issue of his poems, edited by Vosmaer and Kloos, in 1883.