"The work evinces not only a mastery of seventeenth century Dutch, but an insight into metrical effects and facility in reproducing them in English. This version could not have come from one who had not drilled himself for years in the theory and practice of English verse. We bespeak for the handsome volume before us a wide circulation. That such a translation has been sorely needed every student of comparative literature knows. That this need has been adequately met every impartial student of Mr. Van Noppen's version will, we believe, readily admit."--Prof. C. Alphonso Smith, Ph.D., in Modern Language Notes, Baltimore, Md., Dec, 1898.
"The intrinsic value of the work makes the publication of Mr. Van Noppen's translation an event of peculiar literary interest."--John D. Barry, in Boston Literary World.
"The dramatic masterpiece of the great Dutch poet of the seventeenth century has found a skilled and vigorous translator in Mr. Leonard Charles Van Noppen, and the sustained volume is further enriched by a careful memoir of the author of Lucifer and by an elaborate critical Interpretation of the poem. Justice is thus at last rendered to a poet of unquestionable genius and inspiration, of whom everything like a fair estimate has hitherto been hardly possible to an English reader. * * * There is no appeal to the groundlings in the style and quality of the verse, which in Mr. Van Noppen's spirited translation has a march of sustained, or, at least, of rarely failing dignity throughout, and in its intercalated choric passages is by no means wanting in lyrical charm. * * * But after half a dozen, a dozen, a score, of similar parallelisms the odds against chance and in favor of design become so overwhelming that the least mathematically minded of men will reject the former hypothesis. The 'long arm of coincidence' is not so long as all that. And, most assuredly, it is not long enough to cover the fact that Milton's Samson Agonistes followed in due course on Vondel's Samson, and that it abounds in evidences that in the matter of dramatic construction, at any rate, to leave the poetry out of the question, he was content to take his Dutch contemporary as his closely followed model."--London Literature.