Utrecht and the Seven United Provinces, and Admirals Van Tromp, De Ruyter, and De Witt, and Dutch colonies and Protestantism, and Flemish Catholicity and manufactures. Can it be that the truth lies at the bottom of those silent canals? That which helped the country to expel the Spaniards may have also helped to make it self-reliant, self-confident, and at the same time less likely to be affected by foreign influences.

The Museum at the Hague has a world-wide celebrity as a gallery of Dutch paintings. Here is Paul Potter's Young Bull, about which the connoisseur world raves. No doubt a fine animal, very carefully painted, and very like the real thing, as is also his herd, to whom he bears a striking family likeness. As a gem of course one is grateful for having seen it, but somehow you turn with satisfaction to a portrait described in the catalogue as Le Confesseur de Rubbens. There is no mistaking that hand, and the confessor is just what you would have expected; just the man to drop in for spiritual conversation, and end by drinking a jovial bottle in the painting-room. Then there is perhaps the most elaborate Rembrandt extant, the Lecture in Anatomy, with the portrait of Professor Tulp: possibly an unpleasant subject, but certainly a noble piece of drawing, and besides remarkable for the strange weird light which the pale corpse seems to throw over the whole picture. There

are

some few Vandycks, and of course a host of works by Ostade, Douw, Teniers, Mieris, besides men you never heard of before, who all run to interior, and paint crockery beautifully. There are specimens of poultry by Hondekoeter, well-bred birds, with the port and demeanour of eagles or phoenixes; of flowers and flames by Velvet Breughel and Hell Breughel respectively; of shipping by Van de Velde, and Bakhuizen the breezy. But perhaps you will derive as much pleasure as all these can give from three unpre tending little portraits, by Holbein, of Sir Thomas More, Jane Seymour, and one Robert Cheseman. After all, gallery trotting is tiresome, although delightfully improving to the mind, and it is probable that by

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the time you have retired to rest at the Bellevue (conducted by Mr. Maitland, who is of English extraction,' a cheering fact impressed upon you by advertisement and otherwise), the edge will have been taken off your keenness about the arts.

It will not do, however, to give way to sensual drowsiness until you take stock, as it were, of the mental acquisitions made during. the day. But alas, this is easier said than done when one has a confused panorama of Cuyps, and Boths, and Ruysdaels before him every time he shuts his eyes, and is, furthermore, very sleepy. Let you see. There

is the Young Bull, which you are very glad to have seen, and of which you have heard so much: you have read of it too-The Bull, very fine, by Paul Potter, and the next work is the Birth of Ercules and Eyelash, by Van Chislum. This will never do. You are actually quoting the Book of Snobs instead of the catalogue. You must rouse yourself. Well, what do you think of the great Rembrandt? The Professor's face good, evidently a careful portrait, though not so good as Holbein's Sir Thomas More, who is of English extraction-by the way, why does he put that in his advertisement? The body is finely drawn, and lies very heavy and dead. Just cut in the arm too. (Here intersects, as the London Directory would say, an undeveloped snore.) What a shame it was to cut him dead. But perhaps he was mixed up in the execution of the Grand Pensionary Barneveldt. What is a Grand Pensionary? Perhaps you are one yourself. At any rate it is very cold and dark, and there is a crowd of people with torches looking at you. You see it all now. You

are going to be executed as you were last Tuesday night: not a bit more chance for you on this occasion. Suddenly, whick, whack, whick goes something, or somebody, and a voice of derision says 'hoo-ha.' By right you ought to be shot dead, but you only feel a little chilly, and find that you have kicked off the bedclothes, and just as you are coming round off goes the whick, whack again under your window, followed by the hoo ha,' and some remarks in Dutch about the time of

H

night, for such is the amiable fashion in which the watchmen of this country perform their nocturnal duties.

Leaving the Hague behind, the railway runs through scenery exactly like the landscapes you have been looking at in the gallery. You pass several prim but damp-looking villas, surrounded by lawns and gardens laid out in the taste of Mistress Mary of contrary memory, in whose pleasure-ground, it may be remembered, the plants grew all in a row. Near Leyden the train crosses what appears to be a very ordinary canal, but is in reality the poor old Rhine, or at least all of it that the Hollanders allow to keep the name. The treatment which this river receives makes one swell with noble indignation. After a long and honourable course of service to Europe generally, he reaches the Dutch frontier and divides himself, as he has a perfect right to do. Indeed, his obvious intention is to make himself as useful as possible. With the main body of his forces he is making for the sea, intending to look in at Dort and Rotterdam on his way, when a dapper young stream, French by birth but Belgian by choice, comes swaggering down from the Ardennes and falls into him. Not content with the assault, the intruder proceeds to defamation and larceny by destroying his good name and stealing his substance, and laden with the spoil makes off to sea, leaving the wretched Rhine floundering in a Dutch bog, and making hideous mudbanks and islands in his attempts to get out. But this is not the worst. The smaller branch he threw out meets with all sorts of indignities, and is treated no better than a common canal, and this too by a country which owes its existence to the mud contributed by the parent stream, It is run into by opposition watercourses; it is locked up, and, too frequently, dammed; so that at last, exhausted by ill treatment, it can barely stagger into the sea at Katwijk under the affecting title of 'het oud Rhijn.' This last is a downright insult. Why not at once declare the poor old river bankrupt, and hand over everything to the assignees, if there be no court to

take cognizance of the case of Rhine y. Maas, alias Meuse?

But for the alliteration, he who first nicknamed Amsterdam the Vulgar Venice' would have made a happier hit had he called it the Prose Venice. Vulgar it is not, either in the ordinary acceptation of the word, for never was there a town with less tawdry pretentiousness about it; or in the proper sense, for Venice itself is not more thoroughly peculiar in aspect and ways. As in Venice, at every turn you find short steep bridges and narrow canals with tall houses, some leaning forward to get a look at themselves in the murky waters below, others starting back as if in disgust at their distorted features. The Amstel, assisted by locks and gates, and other contrivance meanders through the city somewhat after the fashion of the Grand Canal. The general shape of the two cities is much the same. Y, a broad sea-lake dotted with shipping, is a very fair analogue of that part of the Lagune which lies in front of Venice, and the Lido is aptly represented by the long low line of the Waterland opposite.

The

But the bridges are plain practical structures; the canals have no mysterious look about them; the houses are quaint and picturesque, but without a trace of nobility. The Y looks cold and chilly, and is about the colour of pea-soup. A fat steam ferry-boat puffs across to the Waterland, instead of the gondolas that glide over to the Lido. There is nothing to replace the Ducal palace. or the Piazza, but a lumbering Stadhuis and a formal square in the centre of the town. In fact, Amsterdam is to Venice what an Elzevir is to an Aldine-very neat, very useful and practical looking, quaint, but not elegant. Still it is well worth while to deposit yourself and effects for a day or two at one of the many Doelens that solicit your patronage (every hotel almost in Amsterdam is a 'Doelen' of some sort). And after you have seen pictures and churches, and observed those queer wheelless cabs, the sleep koets, which are really the gondolas of the Dutch Venice, and the fish stalls festooned with bunches of dried eels like strips of shrivelled

gutta percha, and the plump dames from Friesland over the way with gold skull-caps glistening through lace ;-after you have seen all this to your heart's content, is there not a railway waiting to convey you to fresh woods and pastures new; to the verdant shades and green cloth tables of Baden, or the more elevated pleasures of Switzerland. But first there is at least an excursion which you will, indeed must take.

Every one who goes to Amsterdam goes also to Broek, so to prevent unpleasant consequences you will have to devote a part of a day to that pilgrimage. The pleasantest part of the trip is the trekschuit voyage to Buiksloot, and you cannot help wondering how railways ever got a footing in a country where such a luxurious, meditative mode of travelling is indigenous. From Buiksloot a walk of half an hour along a towing-path, by canals fringed with whispering sedge, over vast polders, where everything seems to have gone to sleep, except the windmills, which have gone mad, you come in sight of a pond, or rather a canal in an advanced stage of dropsy, and beyond it some trees, a church, and the houses of the famous capital of cleanliness. It is a sad and a solemn place, that capital. No vehicle, no horse, ever wakes up the slumbering echoes of its one street, which is in point of fact a garden walk neatly paved. Gravel would be too dirty. The houses, all of the exactest chimney-piece order of architecture, green, red, and yellow, varnished and brass-knockered, have all their windows shut and all their blinds down, and seem afraid even to wink lest they should get out of order. The very breeze is not allowed play about here. There is no admittance for it except on business, and that is only when some chimney will not draw. If afflicted with the severest cold in the head you would burst rather than dare to sneeze in a place so totally given over to the abomination of primness, and the only satisfactory looking object you can perceive is on the roof of the toy church. It is a tiler repairing that edifice, and no doubt he is a Pariah to the inhabitants, because

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he is grimy and jolly, and accompanies the clink of his trowel by a merry stave. It is true that all this is only a severe form of that penchant for cleanliness which manifests itself all over Holland. Nowhere else are small fire-engines used for cleaning windows, and pots and kettles kept for the purpose of being scoured. As in other countries they have love songs and drinking songs, so in Holland they have washing songs. One of these has been parodied in our language into a coarse bacchanalian ditty, wholly opposed in sentiment to the original pure Dutch melody, which literally translated is as follows:

Vrouw Van den Bosch,

Though she never would wash Herself, loved scrubbing dearly. You could see by a glance At her pots and pans That she hated dirt sincerely. Singing, Oh, a Dutchwoman's fondest hope

Is that heaven is well supplied with

HET OUD WASCH TUBB. Ik luv het, Ik luv het, en hoo zal snubb Mijn haardt vor luving dat oud wasch tubb?

Ik heb kept het loong a saekred prijz, Vor het duz not liek, is a handij sijz, En mijn blessedt moeder, a vo tu dijrt, Wascht in het herr stochijngs en vater's schijrt;

En hwen wij waer lijttl ze ovt wud skrubb

Mijn broeder en mij in dat oud wasch tubb.

As may be perceived by the above sample, Dutch is by no means difficult, being, in fact, intermediate between English and the language of the Phonetic Nuz. Indeed that periodical, it is said, depended mainly upon its circulation in Holland, where, and especially at the Hague, it was extensively taken in as a substitute for Punch; its humour being considered by the Dutch wits to be more subtle and less severe upon the ruling powers of Europe. 0.

1859.]

be. And Ranke, in his spirit of judicial compromise, thinks that though not a work of high creative genius, they had yet a vast influence.'

They did produce some effect. But it must be acknowledged, in strict impartiality, that it was owing almost entirely to the temper of the public mind, and little to the. intrinsic humour of the piece. A brief account shall be given of the occasion on which the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum were produced. The Prelude to the great Reformation movement will never lose its interest. But it appears to arise before us, at the present crisis of opinion in Europe, with a daily increasing attraction. Thoughtful men, who can read the signs of our times, are becoming aware of the close analogy which the existing conflict of opinion bears to that which was going on in the times just before Luther. The more human activity is forcibly thwarted and checked in a political direction, the more it is directed inwards on first principles. The repressive measures' so loudly called for, and so vigorously applied, have this effect at least. They tie down feverish irritability, and anticipate aimless explosions. But the volcanic matter beneath is not extinguished. Instead of breaking out in flashes on the surface of politics, it feeds on the vitals of opinion. Thus the analogies of the last century, with its superficial scepticism and clash of constitutional theories, fail us. To find a historical parallel, we are driven back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, and to that time of sullen ferment in which the abortive movement of Protestantism was preparing in the public mind.

We are apt to regard the Reformation' as a revolution in Theology and Church arrangements. It became so. And the importance of that after-birth has thrown into the background the true issue as it was originally joined between the friends of progress and its enemies.

То find this issue as it stood in its less complex forms, we must look to Germany before Luther. The universities of Germany, at the beginning of the sixteenth century found themselves invaded by a number of men who were dissatisfied with the

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level of culture, and with the amount of attainment possessed by the authorized and installed dispensers of wisdom. These men were inconsiderable in number, but formidable by their activity, their mutual sympathy, and their definite purpose. This purpose was not theological, It was no part of their aim to disturb a single Church doctrine. Cultivation was their ideal. And in the remains of the Greek and Latin writers, and in a wider knowledge of natural objects, they had found a means of culture for themselves, and now wished that the same means should be made available for the general youth of their fatherland. The old party in the univer sities, to whom mental cultivation was an unintelligible idea, but who were well trained in the professional formulæ of the standard schoolbooks, everywhere resisted. They expelled the Poets,' as the young Reformers were called, forbade them to teach, and prohibited the newfangled books. The party were in earnest, and multiplied in spite of persecution. The young men were fast going over to their side. When a Conservative party has only interest to hold its supporters together, but has nothing to teach, it will maintain its ground for a time, but must give way at last. The University of Cologne was, for various reasons, the stronghold of the party of ignorance. And in the University of Cologne the order of Dominicans, or preaching friars,' had long been in possession of the greatest credit, and held the prin cipal posts of honour.

The affair, in which the authorities of Cologne became seriously embroiled with the whole of the rising Humanist party throughout Germany, was, as usually happens in these cases, not one arising out of the real merits of the conflict between the old and the new. This affair is known as 'the Reuchlin business,' and formed the prelude to the matter of the Indulgences, by which Luther was called into the field. In the Reuchlin business the obstructive party were the assailants, whereas in the general struggle they necessarily occu pied the place of resistance. Just as if they were not likely to have enough on their hands with the