FEITH, ItHYNVIS, • Dutch poet of high reputation, was born on the ith of February 1753 at Zwollo, the chief town of the province of Ovary's-el, in which the family had been a noted one since the time of Everard Frith, a distinguished classical scholar, who flourished in the sixteenth century. Rhynvis, who was the only child of his parents, received an excellent education under a private tutor, and afterwards studied at Leyden, where ho took his degree of Doctor of Laws in 1770, at the unusually early ago of seventeen. At the ago of nineteen he was married to Okje Oroenoveld, with whom he spent the next forty years of his life in an uninterrupted current of domestic happiness, sweetened by literary fame. His first poem, 'The Trannitori nem of the Universe,' which appeared in 1779, was followed by sufficient prose and verse to fill about thirty octavo volumes. The most successful poem of all, 'Fanny,' which was published iu 1787, was devoted to celebrating the connubial felicity of an imaginary Fanny and Edward, concluding with a scene of Fanny at Edward's grave. It was so popular for some years in Holland that it was customary for young persons to learn it by heart, and the whole was set to vaned& Its reputation has now entirely faded ; and two prose novels by the author, ' Ferdinand and Conetantia' and 'Julia,' written at the time of the Werter mania, were from the first condemned as too wroth:neut.]. The other works of Frith have been more fortunate. They are almost all either of a religious or a patriotic cast, and the latter are eminently spirited. A series of his odes, which commences with the outbreak of the American war and lasts to about the com mencement of the French revolution, is interesting In an historical as well aa a poetical point of view, from the light it throw. ou the sentiments of tb. Dutch patriotic or anti-Omuger's party of the period. His' Song of Triumph on the Anniversary of the Victory of the Doggerbank," Washington and Necker,' ' To tho Foes of Nether land; are all animated with the same feelings—shame at the degeneracy of his countrymen compared with their glorious ancestors of the times of Tromp and De Itulter,a most exaggerated estimate of these bygone heroes, and a bitter hostility to England, which, at the time of tile American war, is spoken of as the relentless tyrant of the seas, and viewed in no other light. The same spirit pervades a very fine eulogy on De Ruiner, and an ode on the same hero, both of which were sent anonymously by Feith in 1735 to a society which offered a reward for poems on the subject, and to the first of which the society awarded its first prize, a gold medal, and to the other its second, n silver one, unaware of course at the time that they were from the same band.
Faith closed the first series of his patriotic odes at the time of the Dutch revolution of 1787, too indignant at the turn affairs had taken to continuo them, and little foreseeing at that time what more serious .calamities were in store for Holland. Ile resumed them in 1809, when the country was at the lowest ebb of its fortunes, and he had the satisfaction of concluding the whole with an ode on the fall of Napoleon. Of his didactic poems, 'The Grave' and 'Old Age' are regarded as masterpieces. lie wrote four tragedies, one of which is On the subject of Lady Jane Grey, but the best is that entitled Thirsa, or the Triumph of Religion,' the heroine of which is the Hebrew mother recorded in the book of Maccabees, who exhorted her seven sons to martyrdom. He wrote, in conjunction with Dilderdyk [Disnennse), a new version of Van Haren's poem of ' De Geuzen,' and edited a complete edition of the works of Jacob Cats, the preface to which, a panegyric on the Holland of the seventeenth century, is a fine specimen of vigorous prose. his prose works are chiefly of a religious character, written for prizes offered by a society at the Hague and by the trustees of the Teylerian legacy, a fund analogous to the Bridgewater fund, founded by a miser of Haarlem, which has given birth to a long series of quarto volumes. Another of his work, which gained a prize is an Essay on Epie Poetry,' in which he gives an account of hie intercourse with Klopstock during an excursion to Hamburgh, which seems to have been his only taste of foreign travel. The usual course of his life wan to spend the winter months at' Zwolle, where he filled some municipal offices, and tho summer ones at Boschwyh, a rural retreat near that town, to which be was much attached and where he gratified his taste for landscape gardening. His domestic tranquillity was first broken by the death of his wife in 1813, • loss which ho never entirely recovered. In the next yesr he was invited to form one of the " notables " assembled at Amsterdam to consult on a constitution, but he declined on account of old ege and failing health. lie survived however till 1321, when be died, after a tedious illness, on the 8th of February, one day after his seventy-first birthday. Ile left nine children, one of whom wrote a poem of some merit descriptive of his father's funeral, which it given in the volume entitled, Gedenkeuil voor Mr. lthyuvis Feith,' pnblished at Leeuwarden in 1825. A collected edition of his works, compressed into thirteen volumes, was printed in the MOO year at the Hague, with a life by Van Kampen.