Poetical Exercises

Abstract

When he made his first visits to England Huygens was a young man at the beginning of his poetic career. Apprentice in diplomacy, he had not yet learned the balanced dissimulation of an experienced courtier. For him right and wrong were clearly defined, and he judged freely and often. Satire, of course, was the perfect vehicle for his youthful morality, and to satire Huygens rather vengefully turned. While he was in England on the long negotiations of 1621–22, he composed a poem called ‘’T Costelick Mal,’ or ‘The Costly Folly,’ directed against the court’s excesses in costume and decoration, a theme he developed later in a series of ‘character poems’ called ‘Zedeprinten’ or ‘Moral Prints.’ For both exercises in satire Huygens found models when he was in England. As background to ‘The Costly Folly’ Huygens found much to criticize at the English court, and he was undoubtedly awakened to the possibilities of the ‘character’ tradition by its wide use in England.