Jacob Cats

Jacob Cats (1577–1660), born at Brouwershaven in Zeeland, was a lawyer, diplomat and statesman who rose to be Grand Pensionary of Holland, the republic's highest civil office. Known to the Dutch simply as ‘Father Cats’, he began publishing moral and emblem verse in the 1610s.

His didactic poems on marriage, household conduct and the virtues, together with his emblem books, were the most widely read verse of the Dutch Golden Age and stood beside the Bible on many a Dutch family's shelf for generations. The renderings here are from John Bowring and Harry S. van Dyk's Batavian Anthology (1824).