Education
He studied at Leiden and Orleans.
He studied at Leiden and Orleans.
He began to practice law at Middleburg, and was called to a high official position at The Hague.
Cats was essentially a didactic poet. Contrary to the practice of most other poets of his time, he used the popular language, and this attracted a large audience unable to understand the refined writings of his literary colleagues. The most popular of his works are devoted to the joys of rural life, Ouderdom en Buyten-leven (1655), and to the blessings and troubles of marriage, Houwelyck (1625). A solid Calvinist, Cats pleased the rural population of Holland, who consulted his writings with as much fervor as they used their Bible. Although he was a verbose and often a careless writer, many of his verses sounded like proverbs and axioms and many have passed into the vernacular. At the end of his career his writing became surprisingly frank, as demonstrated in his autobiography, Eighty-Two Years of My Life (1734).