Leiden group was designed but never built. Van Merken represented the 18th-century Enlightenment ideal of an educated, civilized citizen, and for a long time was a model for budding poets. Romanticism ended the popularity of her work, and later attempts by Hendrik Tollens (1852) and Willem Kloos (1909) to reappraise her were unsuccessful. Literary works In her younger years, van Merken mostly wrote occasional poetry, for instance for David van Mollem, owner of the Zijdebalen estate, and for Gerard Aarnout Hasselaar, mayor of Amsterdam. She wrote her first major work in her early twenties; her tragedy Artemines was published in 1745 by Izaak Duim in Amsterdam. In a period of grief she wrote about the comfort she derived from her faith in her didactic poem Het nut der tegenspoeden ("The use of adversities", 1762), a poem that was popular for a long time. When a group of poets joined around 1760 to form a society, "Laus Deo, Salus Populo" ('Honor to God, blessings for the people'), in order to update the archaic rhymed translation of the Psalms by Petrus Datheen, van Merken's future husband was one of them. She joined the group, and when in 1773 the official new version of the Psalms were published, 17 of those were hers, including Psalm 42. After moving to Leiden, van Winter and van Merken jointly published their plays in two volumes, Tooneelpoëzij (1774, 1786). Her classicist tragedies were regularly performed in all the major Dutch cities; on 14 September 1774 the new Stadsschouwburg in Amsterdam was opened with the premiere of her tragedy Jacob Simonszoon de Ryk. Because van Merken rarely commented on contemporary events outside of her occasional poems, her ode in French to George Washington, which she sent to him personally in October 1783, is all the more remarkable. The ode, which hails Washington as the defender of his people's freedom (apparently Van Merken despised the British), contained twenty four-line stanzas. Van Merken waited in vain for an answer, and half a year later, in April 1784, she sent it again, this time accompanied by a letter in French written by her husband. Washington knew little or no French, so he would have had to read both the letter and poem in translated form; two years later a letter from Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette arrived, with two accompanying letters in English from Washington thanking the couple for the