They existed, however, at Utrecht, Amersfoort, Leeuwarden, and Hasselt.

The purity of the language was completely undermined by the rhyming self-called Rhetoricians, and their abandoned courses brought poetry itself into disrepute.

All distinction of genders was nearly abandoned; the original abundance of words ran waste; and that which was left became completely overwhelmed by a torrent of barbarous terms." Wagenaer, in his "Description of Amsterdam," gives a copy of a painter's bill for work done for a rhetorician's performance at the play-house in the town of Alkmaar, of which the following is a translation:-- "Imprimis, made for the Clerks a Hell; Item, the Pavilion of Satan; Item, two pairs of Devil's-breeches; Item, a Shield for the Christian Knight; Item, have painted the Devils whenever they played; Item, some Arrows and other small matters.
Sum total; worth in all xii.

guilders.
"Jaques Mol.
"Paid, October viii., 95 [1495]." Among the Dutch pictures at the Louvre is an anonymous work representing the Committee of a Chamber of Rhetoric.
Roemer Visscher, the father of the poetess, was a leading rhetorician at Amsterdam, and the president of the Eglantine Chamber of the Brother's Blossoming in Love (as he and his fellow-rhetoricians called themselves).

None the less, he was a sensible and clever man, and he brought up his three daughters very wisely.