SOME QUAINT OLD CITIES.[195]

SOME QUAINT OLD CITIES.[195]TheZuyder-Zee will soon be a thing of the past, and in the meanwhile it is but little known. M. Henri Havard, known as an art-critic, has given us a glimpse of it, with its decaying ports, its old-fashioned population, its wonderful atmospheric “effects”; and his book is, strange to say, newer to most readers than one treating of the South Sea Islands or the Japanese Archipelago. Not only is the Zuyder-Zee comparatively unknown to foreigners, but, according to Havard, “it is more than probable that not ten people in Holland have made this voyage, and among writers and artists I do not know a single one.”The navigation of this sea is difficult and dangerous; narrow channels run between enormous sandbanks hardly covered with water. Tales of shipwreck abound in every page of the history of the Zuyder-Zee, and great carcases of ships, breaking up or rotting away, call to mind its dangers. There is no regular communication between the various ports, andM.Havard and his companion,M.Van Heemskerck, had to hire a vessel, engage a crew, and purchase provisions for the voyage. The vessel was called a “tjalk,” and drew only three feet of water; her burden was sixty tons. The crew consisted of the “schipper,” one sailor or “knecht,” and the wife and child of the former. The travellers put up partitions forming kitchen, dining-room,and bed-room, and did the cooking by turns. They started in June, 1873, leaving Amsterdam in the early morning; and, says the author, after a minute description of the Preraphaelite country surrounding the principal sea-port of Holland, “the sun which brightened this magnificent spectacle rendered the atmosphere clear and of a silvery transparence; reflected by the water, the effect was splendid.” The first object of interest which they met with were the sluices at Schellingwoude. “These blocks of granite, imported from distant countries, massed one upon the other, form an immovable mountain; the great gates, which allow five ships to enter abreast, have something majestic about them which impresses the beholder. I know nothing finer than these sluices, save, perhaps, those of Trolhätten in Sweden.”The drowsy, pleasant, monotonous impression of the interminable green meadows, orpolders(reclaimed from the sea), the huge windmills, the few church-steeples of fantastic shapes and varied colors, the yellow sand-banks, is minutely described, and then the travellers come upon the island of Marken, like “a green raft lost in a gray sea.” Seven villages are built on as many little mounds, with a mound used as a church-yard. The wealth of Marken is in hay and fish. The meadows are flooded once a year. Trees never grow on the island, and most of the houses are raised on piles, and look like “great cages suspended in the air.” There is a peculiarity about the bed-roomswhich remind us of the cupboard-beds common among the poorer classes in Scotland: “The ground-floor is one large room divided into as many parts as may be required by wooden partitions without ceilings; the roof—which is, of course, leaning at an angle—is hung with nets and fishing utensils.… The bed is the important article of furniture; this is let into the wall in a kind of cupboard, into which are thrust the mattresses and other necessary articles. Two little curtains are drawn across.… It looks as much as possible like a large drawer. Sometimes considerable luxury is displayed in the bed; the pillow-cases and the sheets are embroidered with open-work, which is a special fabrication of the women at Marken—white and yellow threads crossed, something in the fashion of guipure.” The walls or partitions are mostly painted blue, the shelves are heaped with common crockery and Japanese porcelain, for which there is an extravagant demand all over Holland; a Friesland cuckoo-clock stands in one corner, a carved oak chest in another, and on this are tall glasses, bulging mugs of delf, and miraculously-polished old candlesticks of yellow metal. One of the chief worthies of Marken, Madame Klok, has the richest collection in the island: china of all sorts (Dutch and Japanese) and all colors, pictures, foreign curiosities such as sailors always fill their houses with, are there in profusion; but what she is most proud of is her carved oak chests, all of Dutch make, their panels sculptured with great art, and seeming only just to have left the hands of the artist. The women of Marken have clung to their distinctive dress, and, partly on that account, are thought very uncivilized by theyoung Hollanders, to whom freedom and Paris fashion have become synonymous terms. This dress is very peculiar, and Havard says very picturesque. Here is part of his description:“The head-dress is composed of an immense cap in the form of a mitre, white, lined with brown, to show off the lace and embroidery; it is tied close under the chin, pressing closely over the ears.… Long ringlets of blonde hair fall down to the shoulders or back, and the hair of the front is brought forward and cut square along the forehead a little above the eyebrows. The gown has a body without sleeves, and the skirt or petticoat is independent of it, and always of a different stuff. The body is brown, and generally of cloth covered with embroidery in colors, in which red predominates.… This requires years of labor. Acorsagewell embroidered is handed down from mother to daughter as an heirloom; the sleeves are in two unequal parts: one, with vertical lines of black and white, reaches the elbow, and the other, almost to the wrist, is of dark blue, and is fastened above the elbow.… The skirt is also divided into two unequal parts: the upper, which is about eight inches wide only, is a kind of basque with black lines on a light ground; the rest of the skirt is dark blue, with a double band of reddish brown at the bottom.… Such is the female costume of Marken, … so singular that no other costume is like it, or even approaches its bizarre appearance.”These old Dutch settlements all possess many churches, but most of them disfigured by paint and other monstrosities. The Premonstratensian monks had a monastery at Marken, having come there from Leeuwarden; but the old Marienhot, turned to other uses, was pulled down in 1845 on account of its ruinous condition. At Monnikendam, “the town of the monks,” one of the dead cities—for Marken is only a cluster of villages—there is what is now called the Great Church, but was originally the Abbey ofSt.Nicholas. It has eighty great pillars in the nave alone, and was built in the fifteenth century, though according to the style of an earlier day. It is now a “temple” (Calvinist meeting-house); the columns are whitewashed, there is a modern, bulbous pulpit with green curtains, and the nave is full of ugly, closed pews in the taste of the eighteenth century.Havard describes Monnikendam as having a Chinese appearance through its “green trees, the red and green coloring of the houses and roofs, and the little gray wooden bridge.” In 1573 it had the honor of taking a prominent part in the great naval battle of the Zuyder-Zee, when Cornelius Dirkszoon, a native of Monnikendam, destroyed the Spanish fleet and took the admiral, Count de Bossu, prisoner. The town kept the count’s collar of the Golden Fleece as a trophy. Though the monks have disappeared, the town still preserves its arms—a Franciscan monk, habited sable (black), holding a mace in his right hand, the shield beingargent, or white. The tower of the Great Church is of enormous height, and Havard, as he looked down on the rich plains below, wondered at the insensibility of the inhabitants to the treasures of nature and art within their reach. This deserted place—where the arrival of two strangers was an event of universal importance, to be talked of at least a month after they had gone, and where the old office of town-crier was discharged by a wizened individual in a black dress-coat, knee-breeches, and three-cornered hat, whose duty of fixing notices to the doors of such houses as contained patients attacked by a contagious disease reminds us of the seventeenth century—wasonce “a flourishing commercial city, one of the twenty-nine great towns of Holland, when the Hague was but a village.”Between Edam and Hoorn (the latter being the pearl of the dead cities) the tjalk encountered a terrible storm of wind, which was succeeded by as wonderful a calm. The author says:“I turned my head (towards the eastern horizon) and saw one of the most curious spectacles I ever contemplated in my life. From the hull of the boat to the top of the mast, from the zenith to the nadir, all was of the same tint. No waves, no clouds, no heavens, no sea, no horizon were to be distinguished—nothing but the same tone of color, beautifully soft; at a short distance a great black boat, which seemed to rest on nothing, and to be balanced in space. The sea and the sky appeared of a pearl-gray color, like a satin robe; the boat looked like a great blot of ink. Nothing can give an idea of this strange spectacle; words cannot describe such a picture. Turner, in his strangest moods, never produced anything so extraordinary.”The harbor of Hoorn is now “bordered by masses of verdure, great trees, and flowers. The place of these charming plantations and gardens was once occupied by ship-building yards, from whence sailed annually whole fleets of newly-constructed ships. Hoorn is really one of the prettiest towns which can be found, and at the same time the most curious. It is entirely ancient. All the houses are old and attractive, covered with sculptures and charming bas-reliefs—every roof finishing in the form of stairs. Everywhere wideauventsjutting out over doors and windows; everywhere carved wood and sculptured stone. The tone of color of the bricks is warm and agreeable to the eye, giving these ancient habitations an aspect of gayety and freshness which contrasts in a singular manner with their great age and ancient forms.… It seems almost ridiculous to walk about these streets in our modern costumes. It almost appears to me that there are certain towns where only the plumed hat, the great trunk-hose and boots, with a rapier at our side, are in keeping withthe place; and Hoorn is one of these places.”The emptiness of the streets, the want of all animation, is the shadow of the picture, and the author brings to mind the former bustling prosperity of Hoorn, “filled by an active population, covering the seas with their fleets and the Indies with their counting-houses. Every week a thousand wagons entered the markets, bringing in mountains of cheese from the rich countries around.… Each year there was a bullock fair, first established in 1389, which drew visitors from all corners of Europe. Frenchmen, Danes, Frisons, Germans, and Swedes flocked into the town, and thus augmented its astonishing prosperity. Hoorn then counted twenty-five thousand inhabitants.” It had “massive towers and monumental gates,” and bastions and ramparts, whose place is now occupied by beautiful gardens, shaded by fine trees, and boasting of the few remaining ruinous towers and gates as of picturesque adornments—nothing else. The gate at the entrance of the harbor is of “magnificent proportions and superb in its details.… Among the sculptures I remarked a cow which a peasant-girl is seen employed in milking—a homage to the industry of the country which once enriched the town.” On the top of the other old gate—the Cowgate—is a group of two cows, and on the side facing the town four cows are represented standing, while the heraldic lions by their side support the escutcheon of the town, the arms being a hunting-horn. The remains of the old commerce of Hoorn may be seen on Thursdays, when a market is held in the town, and quantities of cheeses still arrive.“The numbers of people on foot who pour into the town, the carved and heterogeneously-painted wagons, carts, tilburies, and all kinds of old-fashioned conveyances passing through the east gate, almost incline one to believe that the good old times have once more returned to this city. Farmers and cattle-dealers and their wives arrive in the carriages, for the market-day is a holiday; … they sit stolidly in or upon these antediluvian vehicles. I say stolidly; for I do not know a better term to express the calm, silent, reflective look of both husbands and wives.… At ten o’clock the market-place resembles a park of artillery whence the guns have been withdrawn. The red cheeses piled up by thousands represent to the life the cannon-balls rusted by exposure to the air and rain.”In the Guildhall is preserved Count Bossu’s silver-gilt drinking-cup; he was a prisoner in Hoorn for three years after his defeat and capture by the insurgent Dutch. The churches are inferior to the dwellings, having been spoilt by whitewash and plaster and absurd Greek peristyles, perhaps supposed at the Reformation to chase away the evil spirits of an age of superstition. The result is deplorable, and has unfortunately outlasted the fanaticism of the moment, which was responsible for these disfigurements. Although the people of Hoorn claim that their town was rich and famous at the end of the thirteenth century, the first authentic documents point to the middle of the fourteenth as the date of regular municipal incorporation, and the walls were not built till 1426. Hoorn has produced many distinguished men—Abel Janzoon Tasman, who discovered Van Dieman’s Land and New Zealand; Jan Pietersz Kœn, who founded Batavia (Java) in 1619; Wouter Corneliszoon Schouten, who in 1616 doubled Cape Horn, which he named after his native town; Jan Albertsz Roodtsens,a portrait-painter known to art-critics as Rhotius, according to the foolish fancy of the Renaissance for Latinizing one’s “barbaric” name, and others less well known—doctors and lawyers with Latinized names, honorably mentioned as learned men in the archives, and brave seamen, patriotic and enterprising, the Sea-Beggars of the War of Independence against Spain, and successful explorers in tropical seas.Having passed through Enkhuizen, the birthplace of the painter Paul Potter, Havard goes on to Medemblik, the former capital of West Friesland, and the seat of King Radbod’s power. Here, like a true artist, he was struck by a beautiful scene painted by nature, who in these regions, as everywhere else, has so many changing beauties to offer, to distract one’s attention from even the most perfect human works of art. “The town, with its towers and steeples and with its ancient castle, rose up before us against a background of sky of a rosy tint, fading into lilac-gray and a variety of tints; the town itself appearing of a blackish green, while over our heads the sky was of celestial blue; at the very foot of the town the sea repeated all these splendid colorings and completed the picture. A painter who should reproduce this scene without alteration would not be believed; it would be said he had invented the coloring.” Then follows the same story of desertion, emptiness, and decay, that mark the “dead cities,” of which this is perhaps the oldest of all. For the well known incident of King Radbod (repeated seven centuries later by a cacique of Mexico), and his choice of eternal torments with his forefathers rather than heaven with strangers to his blood, we have no room. It illustrates the clannishqualities of the old Teutonic stock. Crossing part of the peninsula least tainted by “improvement,” the author, on his way to Texel, passed through many villages such as we have heard about, but the accounts of which we have believed to be exaggerated. But these are not to be found on the beaten track, and he who has seen the typical Brock has only seen an artificially-preserved specimen, handy and hackneyed, kept on exhibition with the avowed consciousness of its attraction to strangers. “Every one has heard of the marvellous cow-houses, paved with delf-tiles and sanded in different colors, cleaner even than the rooms, where one must neither cough, smoke, nor spit; where one must not even walk before putting on a great pair ofsabots, or wooden shoes, whitened with chalk—cow-sheds in which the beautiful white-and-black cows are symmetrically arranged upon a litter which is constantly changed, and whose tails are tied up to the ceiling for fear of their becoming soiled. Well, it is in these hamlets that one meets with all this.… Sometimes at the end of the stable or cow-shed one sees a parlor with a number of fresh young girls, with their high caps and golden helmets, working at some fancy work or knitting all sorts of frivolity; the fact is that many of these peasants are millionaires living among their cheeses with the greatest simplicity.”Of Texel and Oude-Schild the author says:“When you land, it seems as if you entered a great round basin lined with a thick carpet of verdure; an endless prairie with a few trees … all the country surrounded by high dikes and dunes, which limit the view.… We felt as if we were in an Eden under the waters, with the heavens open above—a bizarre sensation difficult to describe, but whichis very strange and original. The dike that protects the south of the island is almost as grand and important as that of the Helder.… At the place from whence these works spring it was necessary to work under water at a depth of above one hundred feet.… On the North Sea side are moving sands, which, from their desolate aspect, contrast with the rich and verdant meadows they guard from the encroachments of the sea. These dunes are certainly not the least interesting part of the island; they can be entered only on foot or on horse-back. The feet of the horse or man who attempts to cross them sink either to the ankle of the man or the fetlock of the horse. The green meadow suddenly ceases at their edge, and an arid solitude, burnt by the sun, extends beyond our view—we should say a strip of the African desert rather than of the soft and humid soil of Holland.”This passage into the North Sea has seen some of the largest flotillas in the world leave its shelter, and not only great commercial fleets and war fleets, but hardy expeditions of scientific discovery, such as that of the first explorers who sought for a Northwest Passage through the ice of the Pole. Although it failed in this, it discovered Nova Zembla. Twice did the brave William Barends attempt this journey, and the second voyage was his last, while his associate, Jacob Van Heemskerck, returned to Holland to be invested with the command of the navy in 1607, and to attack, under the guns of Gibraltar, the large Spanish fleet commanded by Alvarez d’Avila. Like Nelson, he died in the moment of victory, and fifty years later almost the same fate befell the indomitable Van Tromp. Space forbids to more than mention Harlingen, a resuscitated city, which has managed to regain much of its old prosperity, but is not architecturally very interesting. One of its claims to present attention is the picture-galleryof a self-made man and discriminating amateur—M.Bos; and one of its historical claims dates from 1476, when Menno Simonsz, the founder of the sect of Mennonites, of whom some thousands lately emigrated to this country, was born within its territory, in the province of Witmarsum. From this place the travellers started by canal-boat, ortreckschuit, a barge drawn by a trotting horse through a level, productive country. The boat has a first-class and a second-class compartment, long seats well cushioned for sleeping, a large table for meals, and, as there is no vibration, it is the laziest, pleasantest way of travelling, if one is not in a hurry. The breeding of those splendid black horses, whose long tails sweep the ground, well known throughout Europe, is still one of the sources of wealth of this Frison land, and much of the marvellous wood-carving now stored up in English collections comes from the Frison villages; but of the old costume of the women nothing remains but the golden helmet. Circumstances, however, have preserved the old fashion of skating races, which take place every winter, and are the occasion of regular festivals. The youth of a whole neighborhood gathers together, and the prizes are handed down as heirlooms in the families of the winners. In old times military manœuvres used to be gone through on skates, and these “reviews” were well worth seeing. The Frison skate is a straight iron blade, with which, though you cannot go in any other than a straight line, you can glide along with much greater speed than with the ordinary curved one we use. The only skating ground of Holland—the straight canals—are a sufficient explanation of the difference.On Leeuwarden we will not dwell, as it is an inland city and by no means dead, but must notice a funny item in one of its collections of curiosities—that is a “landdagemmer,” or small pail that state members used to carry when going to council, and in which they put their bread and butter or whatever else they had by way of a luncheon.From Leeuwarden the traveller carries us with him to Franeker, “well built, well lighted, and certainly one of the cleanest and best-kept towns in Friesland,” formerly a famous centre of learning. “Such men as Adrian Metius, the mathematician; Pierius Winsemius, the historian; Sixtus Amama, the theologian; Ulric Huberus, the jurist; and George Kazer, who knew every subtlety of the Greek language, with a mass of other learned scholars, indoctrinated the youth of that age in the sciences, theology, law, history, and dead languages. The spirit of learning became contagious, and the whole city was seized with a desire to acquire knowledge. The students imbued the citizens with a love of the sciences, and the inhabitants, not content with imbibing learning themselves, spread it about on the public walls; and one can still see on the front of the houses, over the doors, and even on the walls of the stables, numbers of wise inscriptions, moral precepts, and virtuous sentences” in Latin, signifying, for instance, “Know thyself”; “Well, or not at all”; “Nothing is good but what is honest,” etc. The Guildhall, built in the same style as the Leeuwarden Chancellerie, but daubed over with paint, contains two or three rooms with their walls literally hidden by gloomy old portraits, said to be those of the professors of the old academy. Amongthem is that of a woman, Anna Maria Schaarman, called by her contemporaries the modern Sappho, and who, besides poetry, music, painting, engraving, and modelling, was a proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Ethiopian. Her works were published at Leyden in 1648.Franeker has a unique exhibition in the shape of aPlanetarium, or a small blue-room, with a movable ceiling, representing the vault of heaven, where the planets, in the form of gilded balls, and by means of a mechanical process, rotate around the sun, which stands in the middle of the room in a kind of half obscurity. The room itself is only lighted by one candle. The whole apparatus is shown by a woman, said to be the grand-daughter of the great mathematician, Eise Eisinga, who devoted seven years of his life, from 1773 to 1780, to making this planetarium.The tjalk, which the travellers had left at Harlingen, now carried them over to Hindeloopen, a sea-port and ancient city, but not one of those which have to complain of the whims of fortune; for it never rose to great importance at any time of its thousand years of existence. Just outside the harbor “the wind suddenly lulled, and one of those dead calms peculiar to these curious shores overtook us. The clouds seemed to stand still in the heavens, the very water lapping against our bows grew still, and, but for a bird skimming the horizon, a sea-dog touching the surface of the waves, or somebruinvischleaping in pure joy under the calm waters, all nature appeared as if wrapped in a deep sleep.” The town began by being a hamlet in the huge forest of Kreijl (most of whose area is now the bottom ofthe Zuyder-Zee), and its name signifies “the hind’s run,” while a running hind forms the municipal arms. The harbor, which in 1225, three hundred years after the origin of the town, was endowed with certain privileges, was never large enough for heavily-freighted ships; and though the inhabitants praiseworthily tried to enrich themselves by forming fishing companies, the boats had to be built in other ports, and the interest of Hindeloopen in these expeditions had always more or less of an artificial character. Notwithstanding the real claims of the town to notice, it has escaped the mention of historians; Cornelius Kempius ignores it altogether; Guicciardini merely refers to it; Blaeu the geographer, in spite of his minute exactitude, only gives it a dozen dry lines; and a later writer, the author ofLes Délices des Pays-Bas(1769), is not more complimentary, though he allows it some “commercial interest.” It often needs an artist’s eye to look with favor on these world-forgotten places, and draw out details which make us wonder how it was possible that they have been hitherto so persistently overlooked. It is often a greater pleasure, we confess, to read of such places than of those greater ones, the pilgrimages of the world, where each successive generation of scholars and explorers flocks to bring to light some fact or some stone, and where, when all that is likely to be important has been found, they still pore devotedly over dust and fragments, eager to tell the world how the ancients ate or dressed, and how their present descendants retain or have lost or modified the old manners and customs. Havard, accordingly, says of Hindeloopen:“Small as it was, it had its arts, its special costume, a style of architecture, and a language only spoken within its walls—which is a fact so singular that it would appear incredible were it not for traces and incontestable proofs of their existence.[196]The most remarkable of its peculiarities was, and is still, the costume worn by the women.… Not content with having a dress different to other nations, the inhabitants of Hindeloopen regulated the style of their costume, and adjusted it according to the age and position of the woman in its smallest detail. From its very birth a child is put into the national costume: its little legs are wrapped in the usual linen, but the upper part of its body is subjected to the prevailing habit of the country. Its head is covered with a double cap—one of linen, the other of silk garnished with the usual kerchief; above this again is placed another calico kerchief, and on that again a third of larger dimensions, scarlet in color and trimmed with lace. The tiny body is cased in a close-fitting jacket, over which is an embroidered bib, and the baby’s hands are put into calico mittens.”Then follows a description of the changes of, or rather additions to, the costume from the age of eighteen months upwards. The marriageable girls wore the most complicated, everything, even the “floss-silk stockings,” being of a certain regulation make, color, and stuff. Married women wore their hair entirely covered by the headdress of square pieces of red cloth embroidered in gold, above the cap itself. Widows wore the same articles, but all black and white; and, besides this daily costume, there were others worn on festival days, chiefly distinguished by a cape or overall, with other details yet, belonging some to Whitsuntide, some to Corpus Christi, and others to betrothed girls, and relating to circumstances,weddings, and funerals, to the length of time a woman had been married, and if she was a mother, etc., etc., in endless and minute array. The town women have already discarded their costume, but it is still universally worn in the country round about. The ancient industries of Hindeloopen—alas! very degenerate nowadays—included aspécialitéin furniture. It was of carved wood painted, and many specimens in Dutch and foreign collections still exist. Havard says of it:“Its general forms have a very decided Oriental cast. Its decorations of carved and gilded palms and love-knots, relieved by the strangest paintings it is possible to imagine, have no equal except in Persian art. As a rule, the colors are loud and gaudy—red or pink, green or blue—but, strange to say, the whole appears harmonious. It is peculiar and striking but not disagreeable to the eye. Most of the single pieces of furniture, such as tables and stands, and sledges are ornamented with red and blue palms, around which are interlaced numbers of Cupids of dark rose-color, the whole on a red ground. Sometimes these constantly-recurring Cupids (always in dark rose-color) are placed among a bed of blue flowers against a background of red, lightened here and there by white dots and touches of gold. But this medley of discordant colors produces a harmonious and dazzling effect, which I can only liken to the cashmeres of India. This same style of ornamentation is adopted in private houses, though the colors are somewhat modified. Red yields to dark blue, and flowers, love-knots, and palms are toned down into soft blue, green, and white, on a background of the finest[197]shade of indigo. The effect thus produced is very curious. I cannot say it is fine or pleasant, but it is not disagreeable to the eye, and certainly possesses the advantage of not being vulgar or common.”Stavoren, the former capital of Friesland, is one of the townswhose traditional annals, like those of Medemblik, reach back into unhistorical times, and whose founder, Friso, a supposed contemporary and ally of Alexander the Great, built here a temple to Jupiter, and adorned his town with walls, palaces, and theatres. The fifth century of our era is its real earliest date, and then it was only what the first settlement of a barbaric clan always is—half-camp, half-village—but it had gained a footing which it never abandoned since. As the centuries passed, we find this town, at the mouth of the Flevum, “the capital and royal residence of Friesland,” and with a “considerable commercial and industrial reputation. Treaties of alliance and trade were entered into with the Romans, Danes, Germans, and Franks, who came to Stavoren to barter their goods.… The Flevum was easy to navigate, thus rendering the port convenient for commerce; able to hold a large fleet whose intrepid sailors explored distances in the North inaccessible to the vessels belonging to other nations. At this epoch the Zuyder-Zee was not in existence, and one could walk on dry land from Stavoren to Medemblik.… A palace was built at Stavoren (by RichardI.) which later on became the sumptuous residence of the kings, his successors,” and Charles, Duke of Brabant, journeyed to Stavoren with a numerous suite to see and admire its wonderful splendors. This was burnt in 808, but in 815 a still more splendid church was built by Bishop Odulphus. It was some Stavoren sailors who first passed through the Sound and opened the way into the Baltic, and the King of Denmark rewarded the town by exempting its ships from dues on entering Dantzic.Treaties with Sweden and Scotland conceded to the town similar privileges, rendering the merchants of Stavoren able to enter the lists with those of the richest and most influential towns in the world. A sixteenth-century chronicler[198]—though we incline to take the statement as typical of the prosperity of the town rather than in its literal sense—says “the vestibules of the houses were gilded, and the pillars of the palaces of massive gold.” This, however, applies to the thirteenth century, the age of Marco Polo and general redundancy of imagination, colored by the traditions of theArabian Nights. But it is true that Stavoren was one of the first towns forming part of the Hanseatic League, and even in the sixteenth century she still held the third rank. Her downfall was due as much to the nature of things as to adverse circumstances. Prosperity spoiled the haughty town: “Her inhabitants had become so rich and opulent that they were literally intoxicated with their success, and allowed themselves to grow insolent, exacting, and supercilious beyond endurance. They were called the spoiled, luxurious children of Stavoren—‘dartele ofte vervende Kinderen van Stavoren.’ Strangers ceased to trade with them, preferring the pleasanter manners of the inhabitants of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bruges. In proportion as trade declined the spirit of enterprise forsook the population, and the town, once so rich and flourishing, now found herself reduced from the first to the tenth rank.” This happened in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth “there were scarcely fifty houses in a state ofpreservation in this city, which formerly was the highest and noblest of all.” Its appearance at the present time is still more sad: “There are about a hundred houses, half of which are in ruins, but not one remains to recall in the vaguest manner the ancient glory of its palaces. It would be difficult to call the place a village even; it is more like one large cemetery, whose five hundred inhabitants have the appearance of having returned to earth to mourn over the past and lost glories of their country and the ancient splendor of their kings.” Outside the harbor is a large sand-bank, called the “Lady’s Bank,” which for several centuries has blocked up the entrance so that no great ships can enter, and tradition has seized upon this to point a moral eminently appropriate to the former proud merchants of this hopelessly dead city. It is said, and repeated by Guicciardini, that a rich widow, “petulant and saucy,” freighted a ship for Dantzic, and bade the master bring back a cargo of the rarest merchandise he could find in that town. Finding nothing more in requisition there than grain, he loaded the ship with wheat and returned. The widow was indignant at his bringing her such common stuff, and ordered him, if he had loaded the grain atbackboort, to throw it into the sea atstuerboort, which was done, whereupon there immediately rose at that place so great a sand-bank that the harbor was blocked; hence the bank is still called “Le Sable,” or “Le Banc de la Dame.”At Urk, a truly patriarchal fishing village, where “every one, as at Marken, wears the national costume, from the brat who sucks his thumb to the old man palsied with age,”and where the inhabitants “consider themselves related, forming one and the same family,” and are “just as hospitable and polite as at Marken,” Havard spent a few very pleasant hours. This place is anterior to the Zuyder-Zee, and was already, in the ninth century, a fishing settlement on one of the islands in Lake Flevo. Havard thinks that the women, with their healthy beauty and graceful but evident strength, are good samples of the race that inhabited these lands a thousand years ago.On entering the mouth of the Yssel the travellers left the tjalk and went across country to Kampen, admiring on their road the beautiful fields with the cows almost hidden in the long grass, the farms on little hillocks looking like miniature fortified castles, and the other farms surrounded by tall trees, where all is of a blue color, from the small milk-pails to the wheelbarrow, and the ladder leading to the loft. Kampen dates only from the thirteenth century, but it grew rapidly, and two hundred years later became an Imperial town, governed itself, and had the right of coining money. At the Reformation there was no breaking of images or destruction of works of art, neither was there any outbreak against the religious orders. Large, massive towers with pointed roofs overhang the quay and flank an enormous wall, through which an arched doorway leads into the town. The Celle-broeders-Poort dates from the sixteenth century, and is built of brick and stone, with octagonal towers, oriel windows, and carved buttresses, besides a gallery projecting over the door. This gate was named after the convent of Brothers of the Common Life, formerly situated in the street leading to thePoort. The order has been made famous by the author of theImitation. It was one of the most popular in the Low Country, and was founded at Deventer by Gerhard Groot, a young and luxurious ecclesiastic, whose life reminds one of De Rancé, and who, giving up his preferments, retired to his own house, where he lived with a few other men in apostolical simplicity. The services of his followers were invaluable during the plague, or Black Pest, in the fourteenth century. His successor was Florent Radewyns, a learned priest, also in high ecclesiastical favor, but who gave up his canon’s stall at Utrecht to embrace the life of a Brother of the Common Life. This institute is not unlike the original one ofSt.Francis of Assisi, founded in Italy a hundred years earlier; only these brothers lived by the work of their hands, mostly as copyists, and as revisers of the manuscripts scattered over the town, comparing them with the originals and rectifying the mistakes of inexperienced or careless copyists. Pope GregoryXI.sanctioned the regulations of the order in 1376, and in 1431, 1439, and 1462 EugeniusIV.and PiusII.confirmed the privileges of the rapidly-growing community, which counted convents by the score all over Holland. About this time they opened schools for the young, and “their instruction was everywhere courted, and their virtues, as well as their great talents, made them welcome even in the most distant countries. Their colleges were dedicated either toSt.Jerome orSt.Gregory, and multiplied with astonishing rapidity.… In their convent (at Brussels) they had a printing-office.” Their devotion to the poor and uneducated, and their endeavors to counteract the progress of theReformation by expounding to the people the authorized version of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, and also uniting their hearers in prayers and offices in Dutch, Flemish, and other vernacular, were misrepresented by their enemies, and twisted into evidence of their heretical leanings.Kampen was rich in religious orders; there were the Minorites (Franciscans), whose church was built in the fourteenth century, and is still the most ancient monument in the town, but is now used as a school; the Recollects, the Carthusians, the Alexians, besides six convents for women. The church ofSt.Nicholas, with its double aisles and its grand simplicity, its beautiful antique pulpit and Renaissance panelling in the choir, is well worth a visit, were it not for the detestable impression likely to be made on the visitor by the excesses in plaster and paint that disfigure the building. Notre Dame, a church almost as large and as old, has been restored, and its sombre, simple, and grand decoration, its panelling in imitation of the Gothic, and its careful imitation of the spirit of ancient ornamentation make it a more satisfactory object of pilgrimage. But the pearl of Kampen is theStadhuis, or Guildhall—or rather what remains of it; for part of it was destroyed by fire in 1543. The façade is very much like the Chancellerie at Leeuwarden, and the niches still contain their original statuettes of the sixteenth century. “This corner of the townhall is a real delight to behold, and to come upon a relic of this sort, religiously preserved from ancient times, is a great source of joy to an artist.” But the special attractions are in the interior, especially in “two rooms, unique in their way,… decorated with carved wainscoting, which have remained intact from the early part of the seventeenth century, when they were used as the council-chamber and judgment-hall.… The walls are furnished with flags, standards, halberds, pikes, … and above the door I noticed some formidable-looking syringes in polished leather, shining like gold, which were used in former times to squirt boiling oil on those of the assailants who approached too close. A magnificent balustrade, crowned by an open gallery with columns supporting arched openings, separates this hall from the other, through which the persuasive eloquence of the advocates penetrated the council-chamber.… Running round the chamber is a huge carved bench, divided into stalls by jutting pedestals which support a pillar of Ionic base and Composite capital. An entablature also running the round of the room, projecting above the pillars, but receding over the stalls, completes this kind of high barrier between the councillors, and adds considerably to the majestic elegance which charms and impresses one. At the end of the hall there is a fine chimney-piece, comprising four divisions. To mention its date, 1543, is quite enough to give an idea of the beauty of its workmanship and the elegance of its curves.” Among its curiosities are some fine silver goblets given to the town, and some pieces of gold-plate belonging to the old guilds, as well as thebox of beans, which served to determine the election of the municipality. It is a smallbonbonnièreholding twenty-four beans, six silver-gilt and eighteen of polished silver. “When it was a question of deciding which of the members of the council should be chosen forthe administration, the beans were put in a hat, and each drew out one by chance, and those who drew forth the silver-gilt beans immediately entered on their new functions. This custom was not confined especially to Kampen, as it was formerly in vogue in the province of Groningen.”Zwolle (not a sea city) is a very old town, but has a modern life tacked on to it, and few of its public buildings, churches included, are worth commenting upon at length, though its history is interesting and stirring. It was the birth-place and home of Thomas à Kempis, known in his own day as Hamerken, but the convent where he lived has unfortunately disappeared.Harderwyk, on the Zuyder-Zee, or the “Shepherd’s Refuge,” was founded at the time of the disastrous flood which made the present sea. Some shepherds collected there from the flooded meadows, and were joined by a few fishermen. A hundred years after its incorporation as a town, it was already prosperous enough to be named in the Hanseatic Union by the side of Amsterdam, Kampen, and Deventer; but it can boast of a better claim to notice than its material prosperity alone, for it had a famous academy, founded in 1372, and specially devoted to theology and what was then known of physical sciences. Except during an interval of half a century, after an inundation that devastated and unpeopled the little city, this school existed uninterruptedly till the French occupation, a little less than a hundred years ago, and among its native scholars, many of whom are honorably known in the history of science, it reckons the botanist Boerhaave. Linnæus spent a shorttime there in study and research, and the town is not a little proud of having been sought out by distant scholars as a centre of the natural science of that day. Both these famous men have a memorial in Harderwyk, the former a bronze statue, and the latter a bust in the public gardens. One of the few interesting remains of the old town is the square tower of Notre Dame, where fires were burnt, by way of a beacon, to guide fishermen and sailors out at night, and indicate the position of Harderwyk. “The sea,” says Havard, “is very wayward in these parts. Formerly it was at some little distance from the town, but gradually it advanced, and ended by washing its walls; now, however, it has in some measure receded.… When the tide is low, fishermen often discover under the sand roads washed up by the waves, paved with stones and bricks, which prove that at some distant period streets existed where now the sea rules.” At present Harderwyk is the depot of the troops intended for the Indian and colonial army of Holland, and is, in consequence, rather a gay little place.The charming, antique, and formerly turbulent town of Amersfoort, the birth-place of the heroic Jan van Olden Barneveldt, truly the “father of his country,” was the last comparatively forgotten place where our author passed before he got back to the beaten track of travel, through Utrecht down the Dutch Rhine to Amsterdam. Of this hardy, learned, and brave people of the Netherlands he says but too truly that they are unknown outside their own frontiers. “Nobody outside” (of course he speaks of popular, world-wide reputation; for they are known in scientific and literary circles) “knows that among the Dutchare to be found honesty, cordiality, and sincere friendship; they do not know that the language of Holland is rich and poetic; that the Netherlanders have exceptionally fine institutions, sincere patriotism, and absolute devotion to their country.” He complains, however, that the country or its representative, the government, does not sufficiently encourage native artists, authors, andsavants, and forces her statesmen to “submit to paltry coteries.” He also says that the decay of trade in the “dead cities” is partly attributable to the supineness of the inhabitants themselves, though that certainly does not tally with their enterprising spirit of old, and adds that Amsterdam, when threatened with the same danger—the moving sands and the encroaching waters, which have turned the harbors of the once wealthy Hanseatic cities into deserts—did not “sleep,” but “with all their ancient energy, not fearing to expend their wealth,” the inhabitants “cut through the whole length of the peninsula of Noord Holland, and created a canal 40 miles long and 120 feet wide, wide enough for two frigates to pass one another”; and when that was found insufficient for their commerce, “they again cut through the width of the peninsula, as they had cut through its length, giving toships of the heaviest tonnage two roads to their magnificent port. This was how the sons of old Batavia fought against the elements—nothing stopped them; and we see that the generations which succeed them are animated by the same spirit, the same firm will, the same calm energy, never to be beaten by difficulties.” And now the last news of importance from the same spot is that of the projected draining of the Zuyder-Zee, which is a plan of gigantic magnitude, the cost being estimated at£16,000,000 sterling—i.e., not far from $100,000,000—but the allotted time scarcely more than two years. The Dutch is a race tenacious of vitality and power, and its future in its colonial empire, which it is now thoroughly and scientifically surveying, bids fair to rival its past. Even these “dead cities,” when they cease to be fishing hamlets and relic-museums, and, by the draining of the inland sea, have to turn for their support to new industries, have a chance of revival. The last marvellous Dutch work—the completion of the North Sea Canal—is a proof that the old energy is yet there, and that great things may yet be expected, nautically, scientifically, commercially, and even agriculturally, of the sturdy old stock of the “Sea Beggars.”[195]The Dead Cities of the Zuyder-Zee: A voyage to the picturesque side of Holland. By Henri Havard. Translated by Annie Wood. London: Bentley & Son.[196]The author has unfortunately omitted to give some of these proofs, and we have only his word for this assertion.[197]Probablylightest.[198]Cornelius Kempius.

TheZuyder-Zee will soon be a thing of the past, and in the meanwhile it is but little known. M. Henri Havard, known as an art-critic, has given us a glimpse of it, with its decaying ports, its old-fashioned population, its wonderful atmospheric “effects”; and his book is, strange to say, newer to most readers than one treating of the South Sea Islands or the Japanese Archipelago. Not only is the Zuyder-Zee comparatively unknown to foreigners, but, according to Havard, “it is more than probable that not ten people in Holland have made this voyage, and among writers and artists I do not know a single one.”

The navigation of this sea is difficult and dangerous; narrow channels run between enormous sandbanks hardly covered with water. Tales of shipwreck abound in every page of the history of the Zuyder-Zee, and great carcases of ships, breaking up or rotting away, call to mind its dangers. There is no regular communication between the various ports, andM.Havard and his companion,M.Van Heemskerck, had to hire a vessel, engage a crew, and purchase provisions for the voyage. The vessel was called a “tjalk,” and drew only three feet of water; her burden was sixty tons. The crew consisted of the “schipper,” one sailor or “knecht,” and the wife and child of the former. The travellers put up partitions forming kitchen, dining-room,and bed-room, and did the cooking by turns. They started in June, 1873, leaving Amsterdam in the early morning; and, says the author, after a minute description of the Preraphaelite country surrounding the principal sea-port of Holland, “the sun which brightened this magnificent spectacle rendered the atmosphere clear and of a silvery transparence; reflected by the water, the effect was splendid.” The first object of interest which they met with were the sluices at Schellingwoude. “These blocks of granite, imported from distant countries, massed one upon the other, form an immovable mountain; the great gates, which allow five ships to enter abreast, have something majestic about them which impresses the beholder. I know nothing finer than these sluices, save, perhaps, those of Trolhätten in Sweden.”

The drowsy, pleasant, monotonous impression of the interminable green meadows, orpolders(reclaimed from the sea), the huge windmills, the few church-steeples of fantastic shapes and varied colors, the yellow sand-banks, is minutely described, and then the travellers come upon the island of Marken, like “a green raft lost in a gray sea.” Seven villages are built on as many little mounds, with a mound used as a church-yard. The wealth of Marken is in hay and fish. The meadows are flooded once a year. Trees never grow on the island, and most of the houses are raised on piles, and look like “great cages suspended in the air.” There is a peculiarity about the bed-roomswhich remind us of the cupboard-beds common among the poorer classes in Scotland: “The ground-floor is one large room divided into as many parts as may be required by wooden partitions without ceilings; the roof—which is, of course, leaning at an angle—is hung with nets and fishing utensils.… The bed is the important article of furniture; this is let into the wall in a kind of cupboard, into which are thrust the mattresses and other necessary articles. Two little curtains are drawn across.… It looks as much as possible like a large drawer. Sometimes considerable luxury is displayed in the bed; the pillow-cases and the sheets are embroidered with open-work, which is a special fabrication of the women at Marken—white and yellow threads crossed, something in the fashion of guipure.” The walls or partitions are mostly painted blue, the shelves are heaped with common crockery and Japanese porcelain, for which there is an extravagant demand all over Holland; a Friesland cuckoo-clock stands in one corner, a carved oak chest in another, and on this are tall glasses, bulging mugs of delf, and miraculously-polished old candlesticks of yellow metal. One of the chief worthies of Marken, Madame Klok, has the richest collection in the island: china of all sorts (Dutch and Japanese) and all colors, pictures, foreign curiosities such as sailors always fill their houses with, are there in profusion; but what she is most proud of is her carved oak chests, all of Dutch make, their panels sculptured with great art, and seeming only just to have left the hands of the artist. The women of Marken have clung to their distinctive dress, and, partly on that account, are thought very uncivilized by theyoung Hollanders, to whom freedom and Paris fashion have become synonymous terms. This dress is very peculiar, and Havard says very picturesque. Here is part of his description:

“The head-dress is composed of an immense cap in the form of a mitre, white, lined with brown, to show off the lace and embroidery; it is tied close under the chin, pressing closely over the ears.… Long ringlets of blonde hair fall down to the shoulders or back, and the hair of the front is brought forward and cut square along the forehead a little above the eyebrows. The gown has a body without sleeves, and the skirt or petticoat is independent of it, and always of a different stuff. The body is brown, and generally of cloth covered with embroidery in colors, in which red predominates.… This requires years of labor. Acorsagewell embroidered is handed down from mother to daughter as an heirloom; the sleeves are in two unequal parts: one, with vertical lines of black and white, reaches the elbow, and the other, almost to the wrist, is of dark blue, and is fastened above the elbow.… The skirt is also divided into two unequal parts: the upper, which is about eight inches wide only, is a kind of basque with black lines on a light ground; the rest of the skirt is dark blue, with a double band of reddish brown at the bottom.… Such is the female costume of Marken, … so singular that no other costume is like it, or even approaches its bizarre appearance.”

These old Dutch settlements all possess many churches, but most of them disfigured by paint and other monstrosities. The Premonstratensian monks had a monastery at Marken, having come there from Leeuwarden; but the old Marienhot, turned to other uses, was pulled down in 1845 on account of its ruinous condition. At Monnikendam, “the town of the monks,” one of the dead cities—for Marken is only a cluster of villages—there is what is now called the Great Church, but was originally the Abbey ofSt.Nicholas. It has eighty great pillars in the nave alone, and was built in the fifteenth century, though according to the style of an earlier day. It is now a “temple” (Calvinist meeting-house); the columns are whitewashed, there is a modern, bulbous pulpit with green curtains, and the nave is full of ugly, closed pews in the taste of the eighteenth century.

Havard describes Monnikendam as having a Chinese appearance through its “green trees, the red and green coloring of the houses and roofs, and the little gray wooden bridge.” In 1573 it had the honor of taking a prominent part in the great naval battle of the Zuyder-Zee, when Cornelius Dirkszoon, a native of Monnikendam, destroyed the Spanish fleet and took the admiral, Count de Bossu, prisoner. The town kept the count’s collar of the Golden Fleece as a trophy. Though the monks have disappeared, the town still preserves its arms—a Franciscan monk, habited sable (black), holding a mace in his right hand, the shield beingargent, or white. The tower of the Great Church is of enormous height, and Havard, as he looked down on the rich plains below, wondered at the insensibility of the inhabitants to the treasures of nature and art within their reach. This deserted place—where the arrival of two strangers was an event of universal importance, to be talked of at least a month after they had gone, and where the old office of town-crier was discharged by a wizened individual in a black dress-coat, knee-breeches, and three-cornered hat, whose duty of fixing notices to the doors of such houses as contained patients attacked by a contagious disease reminds us of the seventeenth century—wasonce “a flourishing commercial city, one of the twenty-nine great towns of Holland, when the Hague was but a village.”

Between Edam and Hoorn (the latter being the pearl of the dead cities) the tjalk encountered a terrible storm of wind, which was succeeded by as wonderful a calm. The author says:

“I turned my head (towards the eastern horizon) and saw one of the most curious spectacles I ever contemplated in my life. From the hull of the boat to the top of the mast, from the zenith to the nadir, all was of the same tint. No waves, no clouds, no heavens, no sea, no horizon were to be distinguished—nothing but the same tone of color, beautifully soft; at a short distance a great black boat, which seemed to rest on nothing, and to be balanced in space. The sea and the sky appeared of a pearl-gray color, like a satin robe; the boat looked like a great blot of ink. Nothing can give an idea of this strange spectacle; words cannot describe such a picture. Turner, in his strangest moods, never produced anything so extraordinary.”

The harbor of Hoorn is now “bordered by masses of verdure, great trees, and flowers. The place of these charming plantations and gardens was once occupied by ship-building yards, from whence sailed annually whole fleets of newly-constructed ships. Hoorn is really one of the prettiest towns which can be found, and at the same time the most curious. It is entirely ancient. All the houses are old and attractive, covered with sculptures and charming bas-reliefs—every roof finishing in the form of stairs. Everywhere wideauventsjutting out over doors and windows; everywhere carved wood and sculptured stone. The tone of color of the bricks is warm and agreeable to the eye, giving these ancient habitations an aspect of gayety and freshness which contrasts in a singular manner with their great age and ancient forms.… It seems almost ridiculous to walk about these streets in our modern costumes. It almost appears to me that there are certain towns where only the plumed hat, the great trunk-hose and boots, with a rapier at our side, are in keeping withthe place; and Hoorn is one of these places.”

The emptiness of the streets, the want of all animation, is the shadow of the picture, and the author brings to mind the former bustling prosperity of Hoorn, “filled by an active population, covering the seas with their fleets and the Indies with their counting-houses. Every week a thousand wagons entered the markets, bringing in mountains of cheese from the rich countries around.… Each year there was a bullock fair, first established in 1389, which drew visitors from all corners of Europe. Frenchmen, Danes, Frisons, Germans, and Swedes flocked into the town, and thus augmented its astonishing prosperity. Hoorn then counted twenty-five thousand inhabitants.” It had “massive towers and monumental gates,” and bastions and ramparts, whose place is now occupied by beautiful gardens, shaded by fine trees, and boasting of the few remaining ruinous towers and gates as of picturesque adornments—nothing else. The gate at the entrance of the harbor is of “magnificent proportions and superb in its details.… Among the sculptures I remarked a cow which a peasant-girl is seen employed in milking—a homage to the industry of the country which once enriched the town.” On the top of the other old gate—the Cowgate—is a group of two cows, and on the side facing the town four cows are represented standing, while the heraldic lions by their side support the escutcheon of the town, the arms being a hunting-horn. The remains of the old commerce of Hoorn may be seen on Thursdays, when a market is held in the town, and quantities of cheeses still arrive.

“The numbers of people on foot who pour into the town, the carved and heterogeneously-painted wagons, carts, tilburies, and all kinds of old-fashioned conveyances passing through the east gate, almost incline one to believe that the good old times have once more returned to this city. Farmers and cattle-dealers and their wives arrive in the carriages, for the market-day is a holiday; … they sit stolidly in or upon these antediluvian vehicles. I say stolidly; for I do not know a better term to express the calm, silent, reflective look of both husbands and wives.… At ten o’clock the market-place resembles a park of artillery whence the guns have been withdrawn. The red cheeses piled up by thousands represent to the life the cannon-balls rusted by exposure to the air and rain.”

In the Guildhall is preserved Count Bossu’s silver-gilt drinking-cup; he was a prisoner in Hoorn for three years after his defeat and capture by the insurgent Dutch. The churches are inferior to the dwellings, having been spoilt by whitewash and plaster and absurd Greek peristyles, perhaps supposed at the Reformation to chase away the evil spirits of an age of superstition. The result is deplorable, and has unfortunately outlasted the fanaticism of the moment, which was responsible for these disfigurements. Although the people of Hoorn claim that their town was rich and famous at the end of the thirteenth century, the first authentic documents point to the middle of the fourteenth as the date of regular municipal incorporation, and the walls were not built till 1426. Hoorn has produced many distinguished men—Abel Janzoon Tasman, who discovered Van Dieman’s Land and New Zealand; Jan Pietersz Kœn, who founded Batavia (Java) in 1619; Wouter Corneliszoon Schouten, who in 1616 doubled Cape Horn, which he named after his native town; Jan Albertsz Roodtsens,a portrait-painter known to art-critics as Rhotius, according to the foolish fancy of the Renaissance for Latinizing one’s “barbaric” name, and others less well known—doctors and lawyers with Latinized names, honorably mentioned as learned men in the archives, and brave seamen, patriotic and enterprising, the Sea-Beggars of the War of Independence against Spain, and successful explorers in tropical seas.

Having passed through Enkhuizen, the birthplace of the painter Paul Potter, Havard goes on to Medemblik, the former capital of West Friesland, and the seat of King Radbod’s power. Here, like a true artist, he was struck by a beautiful scene painted by nature, who in these regions, as everywhere else, has so many changing beauties to offer, to distract one’s attention from even the most perfect human works of art. “The town, with its towers and steeples and with its ancient castle, rose up before us against a background of sky of a rosy tint, fading into lilac-gray and a variety of tints; the town itself appearing of a blackish green, while over our heads the sky was of celestial blue; at the very foot of the town the sea repeated all these splendid colorings and completed the picture. A painter who should reproduce this scene without alteration would not be believed; it would be said he had invented the coloring.” Then follows the same story of desertion, emptiness, and decay, that mark the “dead cities,” of which this is perhaps the oldest of all. For the well known incident of King Radbod (repeated seven centuries later by a cacique of Mexico), and his choice of eternal torments with his forefathers rather than heaven with strangers to his blood, we have no room. It illustrates the clannishqualities of the old Teutonic stock. Crossing part of the peninsula least tainted by “improvement,” the author, on his way to Texel, passed through many villages such as we have heard about, but the accounts of which we have believed to be exaggerated. But these are not to be found on the beaten track, and he who has seen the typical Brock has only seen an artificially-preserved specimen, handy and hackneyed, kept on exhibition with the avowed consciousness of its attraction to strangers. “Every one has heard of the marvellous cow-houses, paved with delf-tiles and sanded in different colors, cleaner even than the rooms, where one must neither cough, smoke, nor spit; where one must not even walk before putting on a great pair ofsabots, or wooden shoes, whitened with chalk—cow-sheds in which the beautiful white-and-black cows are symmetrically arranged upon a litter which is constantly changed, and whose tails are tied up to the ceiling for fear of their becoming soiled. Well, it is in these hamlets that one meets with all this.… Sometimes at the end of the stable or cow-shed one sees a parlor with a number of fresh young girls, with their high caps and golden helmets, working at some fancy work or knitting all sorts of frivolity; the fact is that many of these peasants are millionaires living among their cheeses with the greatest simplicity.”

Of Texel and Oude-Schild the author says:

“When you land, it seems as if you entered a great round basin lined with a thick carpet of verdure; an endless prairie with a few trees … all the country surrounded by high dikes and dunes, which limit the view.… We felt as if we were in an Eden under the waters, with the heavens open above—a bizarre sensation difficult to describe, but whichis very strange and original. The dike that protects the south of the island is almost as grand and important as that of the Helder.… At the place from whence these works spring it was necessary to work under water at a depth of above one hundred feet.… On the North Sea side are moving sands, which, from their desolate aspect, contrast with the rich and verdant meadows they guard from the encroachments of the sea. These dunes are certainly not the least interesting part of the island; they can be entered only on foot or on horse-back. The feet of the horse or man who attempts to cross them sink either to the ankle of the man or the fetlock of the horse. The green meadow suddenly ceases at their edge, and an arid solitude, burnt by the sun, extends beyond our view—we should say a strip of the African desert rather than of the soft and humid soil of Holland.”

This passage into the North Sea has seen some of the largest flotillas in the world leave its shelter, and not only great commercial fleets and war fleets, but hardy expeditions of scientific discovery, such as that of the first explorers who sought for a Northwest Passage through the ice of the Pole. Although it failed in this, it discovered Nova Zembla. Twice did the brave William Barends attempt this journey, and the second voyage was his last, while his associate, Jacob Van Heemskerck, returned to Holland to be invested with the command of the navy in 1607, and to attack, under the guns of Gibraltar, the large Spanish fleet commanded by Alvarez d’Avila. Like Nelson, he died in the moment of victory, and fifty years later almost the same fate befell the indomitable Van Tromp. Space forbids to more than mention Harlingen, a resuscitated city, which has managed to regain much of its old prosperity, but is not architecturally very interesting. One of its claims to present attention is the picture-galleryof a self-made man and discriminating amateur—M.Bos; and one of its historical claims dates from 1476, when Menno Simonsz, the founder of the sect of Mennonites, of whom some thousands lately emigrated to this country, was born within its territory, in the province of Witmarsum. From this place the travellers started by canal-boat, ortreckschuit, a barge drawn by a trotting horse through a level, productive country. The boat has a first-class and a second-class compartment, long seats well cushioned for sleeping, a large table for meals, and, as there is no vibration, it is the laziest, pleasantest way of travelling, if one is not in a hurry. The breeding of those splendid black horses, whose long tails sweep the ground, well known throughout Europe, is still one of the sources of wealth of this Frison land, and much of the marvellous wood-carving now stored up in English collections comes from the Frison villages; but of the old costume of the women nothing remains but the golden helmet. Circumstances, however, have preserved the old fashion of skating races, which take place every winter, and are the occasion of regular festivals. The youth of a whole neighborhood gathers together, and the prizes are handed down as heirlooms in the families of the winners. In old times military manœuvres used to be gone through on skates, and these “reviews” were well worth seeing. The Frison skate is a straight iron blade, with which, though you cannot go in any other than a straight line, you can glide along with much greater speed than with the ordinary curved one we use. The only skating ground of Holland—the straight canals—are a sufficient explanation of the difference.

On Leeuwarden we will not dwell, as it is an inland city and by no means dead, but must notice a funny item in one of its collections of curiosities—that is a “landdagemmer,” or small pail that state members used to carry when going to council, and in which they put their bread and butter or whatever else they had by way of a luncheon.

From Leeuwarden the traveller carries us with him to Franeker, “well built, well lighted, and certainly one of the cleanest and best-kept towns in Friesland,” formerly a famous centre of learning. “Such men as Adrian Metius, the mathematician; Pierius Winsemius, the historian; Sixtus Amama, the theologian; Ulric Huberus, the jurist; and George Kazer, who knew every subtlety of the Greek language, with a mass of other learned scholars, indoctrinated the youth of that age in the sciences, theology, law, history, and dead languages. The spirit of learning became contagious, and the whole city was seized with a desire to acquire knowledge. The students imbued the citizens with a love of the sciences, and the inhabitants, not content with imbibing learning themselves, spread it about on the public walls; and one can still see on the front of the houses, over the doors, and even on the walls of the stables, numbers of wise inscriptions, moral precepts, and virtuous sentences” in Latin, signifying, for instance, “Know thyself”; “Well, or not at all”; “Nothing is good but what is honest,” etc. The Guildhall, built in the same style as the Leeuwarden Chancellerie, but daubed over with paint, contains two or three rooms with their walls literally hidden by gloomy old portraits, said to be those of the professors of the old academy. Amongthem is that of a woman, Anna Maria Schaarman, called by her contemporaries the modern Sappho, and who, besides poetry, music, painting, engraving, and modelling, was a proficient in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Ethiopian. Her works were published at Leyden in 1648.

Franeker has a unique exhibition in the shape of aPlanetarium, or a small blue-room, with a movable ceiling, representing the vault of heaven, where the planets, in the form of gilded balls, and by means of a mechanical process, rotate around the sun, which stands in the middle of the room in a kind of half obscurity. The room itself is only lighted by one candle. The whole apparatus is shown by a woman, said to be the grand-daughter of the great mathematician, Eise Eisinga, who devoted seven years of his life, from 1773 to 1780, to making this planetarium.

The tjalk, which the travellers had left at Harlingen, now carried them over to Hindeloopen, a sea-port and ancient city, but not one of those which have to complain of the whims of fortune; for it never rose to great importance at any time of its thousand years of existence. Just outside the harbor “the wind suddenly lulled, and one of those dead calms peculiar to these curious shores overtook us. The clouds seemed to stand still in the heavens, the very water lapping against our bows grew still, and, but for a bird skimming the horizon, a sea-dog touching the surface of the waves, or somebruinvischleaping in pure joy under the calm waters, all nature appeared as if wrapped in a deep sleep.” The town began by being a hamlet in the huge forest of Kreijl (most of whose area is now the bottom ofthe Zuyder-Zee), and its name signifies “the hind’s run,” while a running hind forms the municipal arms. The harbor, which in 1225, three hundred years after the origin of the town, was endowed with certain privileges, was never large enough for heavily-freighted ships; and though the inhabitants praiseworthily tried to enrich themselves by forming fishing companies, the boats had to be built in other ports, and the interest of Hindeloopen in these expeditions had always more or less of an artificial character. Notwithstanding the real claims of the town to notice, it has escaped the mention of historians; Cornelius Kempius ignores it altogether; Guicciardini merely refers to it; Blaeu the geographer, in spite of his minute exactitude, only gives it a dozen dry lines; and a later writer, the author ofLes Délices des Pays-Bas(1769), is not more complimentary, though he allows it some “commercial interest.” It often needs an artist’s eye to look with favor on these world-forgotten places, and draw out details which make us wonder how it was possible that they have been hitherto so persistently overlooked. It is often a greater pleasure, we confess, to read of such places than of those greater ones, the pilgrimages of the world, where each successive generation of scholars and explorers flocks to bring to light some fact or some stone, and where, when all that is likely to be important has been found, they still pore devotedly over dust and fragments, eager to tell the world how the ancients ate or dressed, and how their present descendants retain or have lost or modified the old manners and customs. Havard, accordingly, says of Hindeloopen:

“Small as it was, it had its arts, its special costume, a style of architecture, and a language only spoken within its walls—which is a fact so singular that it would appear incredible were it not for traces and incontestable proofs of their existence.[196]The most remarkable of its peculiarities was, and is still, the costume worn by the women.… Not content with having a dress different to other nations, the inhabitants of Hindeloopen regulated the style of their costume, and adjusted it according to the age and position of the woman in its smallest detail. From its very birth a child is put into the national costume: its little legs are wrapped in the usual linen, but the upper part of its body is subjected to the prevailing habit of the country. Its head is covered with a double cap—one of linen, the other of silk garnished with the usual kerchief; above this again is placed another calico kerchief, and on that again a third of larger dimensions, scarlet in color and trimmed with lace. The tiny body is cased in a close-fitting jacket, over which is an embroidered bib, and the baby’s hands are put into calico mittens.”

Then follows a description of the changes of, or rather additions to, the costume from the age of eighteen months upwards. The marriageable girls wore the most complicated, everything, even the “floss-silk stockings,” being of a certain regulation make, color, and stuff. Married women wore their hair entirely covered by the headdress of square pieces of red cloth embroidered in gold, above the cap itself. Widows wore the same articles, but all black and white; and, besides this daily costume, there were others worn on festival days, chiefly distinguished by a cape or overall, with other details yet, belonging some to Whitsuntide, some to Corpus Christi, and others to betrothed girls, and relating to circumstances,weddings, and funerals, to the length of time a woman had been married, and if she was a mother, etc., etc., in endless and minute array. The town women have already discarded their costume, but it is still universally worn in the country round about. The ancient industries of Hindeloopen—alas! very degenerate nowadays—included aspécialitéin furniture. It was of carved wood painted, and many specimens in Dutch and foreign collections still exist. Havard says of it:

“Its general forms have a very decided Oriental cast. Its decorations of carved and gilded palms and love-knots, relieved by the strangest paintings it is possible to imagine, have no equal except in Persian art. As a rule, the colors are loud and gaudy—red or pink, green or blue—but, strange to say, the whole appears harmonious. It is peculiar and striking but not disagreeable to the eye. Most of the single pieces of furniture, such as tables and stands, and sledges are ornamented with red and blue palms, around which are interlaced numbers of Cupids of dark rose-color, the whole on a red ground. Sometimes these constantly-recurring Cupids (always in dark rose-color) are placed among a bed of blue flowers against a background of red, lightened here and there by white dots and touches of gold. But this medley of discordant colors produces a harmonious and dazzling effect, which I can only liken to the cashmeres of India. This same style of ornamentation is adopted in private houses, though the colors are somewhat modified. Red yields to dark blue, and flowers, love-knots, and palms are toned down into soft blue, green, and white, on a background of the finest[197]shade of indigo. The effect thus produced is very curious. I cannot say it is fine or pleasant, but it is not disagreeable to the eye, and certainly possesses the advantage of not being vulgar or common.”

Stavoren, the former capital of Friesland, is one of the townswhose traditional annals, like those of Medemblik, reach back into unhistorical times, and whose founder, Friso, a supposed contemporary and ally of Alexander the Great, built here a temple to Jupiter, and adorned his town with walls, palaces, and theatres. The fifth century of our era is its real earliest date, and then it was only what the first settlement of a barbaric clan always is—half-camp, half-village—but it had gained a footing which it never abandoned since. As the centuries passed, we find this town, at the mouth of the Flevum, “the capital and royal residence of Friesland,” and with a “considerable commercial and industrial reputation. Treaties of alliance and trade were entered into with the Romans, Danes, Germans, and Franks, who came to Stavoren to barter their goods.… The Flevum was easy to navigate, thus rendering the port convenient for commerce; able to hold a large fleet whose intrepid sailors explored distances in the North inaccessible to the vessels belonging to other nations. At this epoch the Zuyder-Zee was not in existence, and one could walk on dry land from Stavoren to Medemblik.… A palace was built at Stavoren (by RichardI.) which later on became the sumptuous residence of the kings, his successors,” and Charles, Duke of Brabant, journeyed to Stavoren with a numerous suite to see and admire its wonderful splendors. This was burnt in 808, but in 815 a still more splendid church was built by Bishop Odulphus. It was some Stavoren sailors who first passed through the Sound and opened the way into the Baltic, and the King of Denmark rewarded the town by exempting its ships from dues on entering Dantzic.Treaties with Sweden and Scotland conceded to the town similar privileges, rendering the merchants of Stavoren able to enter the lists with those of the richest and most influential towns in the world. A sixteenth-century chronicler[198]—though we incline to take the statement as typical of the prosperity of the town rather than in its literal sense—says “the vestibules of the houses were gilded, and the pillars of the palaces of massive gold.” This, however, applies to the thirteenth century, the age of Marco Polo and general redundancy of imagination, colored by the traditions of theArabian Nights. But it is true that Stavoren was one of the first towns forming part of the Hanseatic League, and even in the sixteenth century she still held the third rank. Her downfall was due as much to the nature of things as to adverse circumstances. Prosperity spoiled the haughty town: “Her inhabitants had become so rich and opulent that they were literally intoxicated with their success, and allowed themselves to grow insolent, exacting, and supercilious beyond endurance. They were called the spoiled, luxurious children of Stavoren—‘dartele ofte vervende Kinderen van Stavoren.’ Strangers ceased to trade with them, preferring the pleasanter manners of the inhabitants of Hamburg, Lübeck, and Bruges. In proportion as trade declined the spirit of enterprise forsook the population, and the town, once so rich and flourishing, now found herself reduced from the first to the tenth rank.” This happened in the fourteenth century, and by the sixteenth “there were scarcely fifty houses in a state ofpreservation in this city, which formerly was the highest and noblest of all.” Its appearance at the present time is still more sad: “There are about a hundred houses, half of which are in ruins, but not one remains to recall in the vaguest manner the ancient glory of its palaces. It would be difficult to call the place a village even; it is more like one large cemetery, whose five hundred inhabitants have the appearance of having returned to earth to mourn over the past and lost glories of their country and the ancient splendor of their kings.” Outside the harbor is a large sand-bank, called the “Lady’s Bank,” which for several centuries has blocked up the entrance so that no great ships can enter, and tradition has seized upon this to point a moral eminently appropriate to the former proud merchants of this hopelessly dead city. It is said, and repeated by Guicciardini, that a rich widow, “petulant and saucy,” freighted a ship for Dantzic, and bade the master bring back a cargo of the rarest merchandise he could find in that town. Finding nothing more in requisition there than grain, he loaded the ship with wheat and returned. The widow was indignant at his bringing her such common stuff, and ordered him, if he had loaded the grain atbackboort, to throw it into the sea atstuerboort, which was done, whereupon there immediately rose at that place so great a sand-bank that the harbor was blocked; hence the bank is still called “Le Sable,” or “Le Banc de la Dame.”

At Urk, a truly patriarchal fishing village, where “every one, as at Marken, wears the national costume, from the brat who sucks his thumb to the old man palsied with age,”and where the inhabitants “consider themselves related, forming one and the same family,” and are “just as hospitable and polite as at Marken,” Havard spent a few very pleasant hours. This place is anterior to the Zuyder-Zee, and was already, in the ninth century, a fishing settlement on one of the islands in Lake Flevo. Havard thinks that the women, with their healthy beauty and graceful but evident strength, are good samples of the race that inhabited these lands a thousand years ago.

On entering the mouth of the Yssel the travellers left the tjalk and went across country to Kampen, admiring on their road the beautiful fields with the cows almost hidden in the long grass, the farms on little hillocks looking like miniature fortified castles, and the other farms surrounded by tall trees, where all is of a blue color, from the small milk-pails to the wheelbarrow, and the ladder leading to the loft. Kampen dates only from the thirteenth century, but it grew rapidly, and two hundred years later became an Imperial town, governed itself, and had the right of coining money. At the Reformation there was no breaking of images or destruction of works of art, neither was there any outbreak against the religious orders. Large, massive towers with pointed roofs overhang the quay and flank an enormous wall, through which an arched doorway leads into the town. The Celle-broeders-Poort dates from the sixteenth century, and is built of brick and stone, with octagonal towers, oriel windows, and carved buttresses, besides a gallery projecting over the door. This gate was named after the convent of Brothers of the Common Life, formerly situated in the street leading to thePoort. The order has been made famous by the author of theImitation. It was one of the most popular in the Low Country, and was founded at Deventer by Gerhard Groot, a young and luxurious ecclesiastic, whose life reminds one of De Rancé, and who, giving up his preferments, retired to his own house, where he lived with a few other men in apostolical simplicity. The services of his followers were invaluable during the plague, or Black Pest, in the fourteenth century. His successor was Florent Radewyns, a learned priest, also in high ecclesiastical favor, but who gave up his canon’s stall at Utrecht to embrace the life of a Brother of the Common Life. This institute is not unlike the original one ofSt.Francis of Assisi, founded in Italy a hundred years earlier; only these brothers lived by the work of their hands, mostly as copyists, and as revisers of the manuscripts scattered over the town, comparing them with the originals and rectifying the mistakes of inexperienced or careless copyists. Pope GregoryXI.sanctioned the regulations of the order in 1376, and in 1431, 1439, and 1462 EugeniusIV.and PiusII.confirmed the privileges of the rapidly-growing community, which counted convents by the score all over Holland. About this time they opened schools for the young, and “their instruction was everywhere courted, and their virtues, as well as their great talents, made them welcome even in the most distant countries. Their colleges were dedicated either toSt.Jerome orSt.Gregory, and multiplied with astonishing rapidity.… In their convent (at Brussels) they had a printing-office.” Their devotion to the poor and uneducated, and their endeavors to counteract the progress of theReformation by expounding to the people the authorized version of the Scriptures in the vulgar tongue, and also uniting their hearers in prayers and offices in Dutch, Flemish, and other vernacular, were misrepresented by their enemies, and twisted into evidence of their heretical leanings.

Kampen was rich in religious orders; there were the Minorites (Franciscans), whose church was built in the fourteenth century, and is still the most ancient monument in the town, but is now used as a school; the Recollects, the Carthusians, the Alexians, besides six convents for women. The church ofSt.Nicholas, with its double aisles and its grand simplicity, its beautiful antique pulpit and Renaissance panelling in the choir, is well worth a visit, were it not for the detestable impression likely to be made on the visitor by the excesses in plaster and paint that disfigure the building. Notre Dame, a church almost as large and as old, has been restored, and its sombre, simple, and grand decoration, its panelling in imitation of the Gothic, and its careful imitation of the spirit of ancient ornamentation make it a more satisfactory object of pilgrimage. But the pearl of Kampen is theStadhuis, or Guildhall—or rather what remains of it; for part of it was destroyed by fire in 1543. The façade is very much like the Chancellerie at Leeuwarden, and the niches still contain their original statuettes of the sixteenth century. “This corner of the townhall is a real delight to behold, and to come upon a relic of this sort, religiously preserved from ancient times, is a great source of joy to an artist.” But the special attractions are in the interior, especially in “two rooms, unique in their way,… decorated with carved wainscoting, which have remained intact from the early part of the seventeenth century, when they were used as the council-chamber and judgment-hall.… The walls are furnished with flags, standards, halberds, pikes, … and above the door I noticed some formidable-looking syringes in polished leather, shining like gold, which were used in former times to squirt boiling oil on those of the assailants who approached too close. A magnificent balustrade, crowned by an open gallery with columns supporting arched openings, separates this hall from the other, through which the persuasive eloquence of the advocates penetrated the council-chamber.… Running round the chamber is a huge carved bench, divided into stalls by jutting pedestals which support a pillar of Ionic base and Composite capital. An entablature also running the round of the room, projecting above the pillars, but receding over the stalls, completes this kind of high barrier between the councillors, and adds considerably to the majestic elegance which charms and impresses one. At the end of the hall there is a fine chimney-piece, comprising four divisions. To mention its date, 1543, is quite enough to give an idea of the beauty of its workmanship and the elegance of its curves.” Among its curiosities are some fine silver goblets given to the town, and some pieces of gold-plate belonging to the old guilds, as well as thebox of beans, which served to determine the election of the municipality. It is a smallbonbonnièreholding twenty-four beans, six silver-gilt and eighteen of polished silver. “When it was a question of deciding which of the members of the council should be chosen forthe administration, the beans were put in a hat, and each drew out one by chance, and those who drew forth the silver-gilt beans immediately entered on their new functions. This custom was not confined especially to Kampen, as it was formerly in vogue in the province of Groningen.”

Zwolle (not a sea city) is a very old town, but has a modern life tacked on to it, and few of its public buildings, churches included, are worth commenting upon at length, though its history is interesting and stirring. It was the birth-place and home of Thomas à Kempis, known in his own day as Hamerken, but the convent where he lived has unfortunately disappeared.

Harderwyk, on the Zuyder-Zee, or the “Shepherd’s Refuge,” was founded at the time of the disastrous flood which made the present sea. Some shepherds collected there from the flooded meadows, and were joined by a few fishermen. A hundred years after its incorporation as a town, it was already prosperous enough to be named in the Hanseatic Union by the side of Amsterdam, Kampen, and Deventer; but it can boast of a better claim to notice than its material prosperity alone, for it had a famous academy, founded in 1372, and specially devoted to theology and what was then known of physical sciences. Except during an interval of half a century, after an inundation that devastated and unpeopled the little city, this school existed uninterruptedly till the French occupation, a little less than a hundred years ago, and among its native scholars, many of whom are honorably known in the history of science, it reckons the botanist Boerhaave. Linnæus spent a shorttime there in study and research, and the town is not a little proud of having been sought out by distant scholars as a centre of the natural science of that day. Both these famous men have a memorial in Harderwyk, the former a bronze statue, and the latter a bust in the public gardens. One of the few interesting remains of the old town is the square tower of Notre Dame, where fires were burnt, by way of a beacon, to guide fishermen and sailors out at night, and indicate the position of Harderwyk. “The sea,” says Havard, “is very wayward in these parts. Formerly it was at some little distance from the town, but gradually it advanced, and ended by washing its walls; now, however, it has in some measure receded.… When the tide is low, fishermen often discover under the sand roads washed up by the waves, paved with stones and bricks, which prove that at some distant period streets existed where now the sea rules.” At present Harderwyk is the depot of the troops intended for the Indian and colonial army of Holland, and is, in consequence, rather a gay little place.

The charming, antique, and formerly turbulent town of Amersfoort, the birth-place of the heroic Jan van Olden Barneveldt, truly the “father of his country,” was the last comparatively forgotten place where our author passed before he got back to the beaten track of travel, through Utrecht down the Dutch Rhine to Amsterdam. Of this hardy, learned, and brave people of the Netherlands he says but too truly that they are unknown outside their own frontiers. “Nobody outside” (of course he speaks of popular, world-wide reputation; for they are known in scientific and literary circles) “knows that among the Dutchare to be found honesty, cordiality, and sincere friendship; they do not know that the language of Holland is rich and poetic; that the Netherlanders have exceptionally fine institutions, sincere patriotism, and absolute devotion to their country.” He complains, however, that the country or its representative, the government, does not sufficiently encourage native artists, authors, andsavants, and forces her statesmen to “submit to paltry coteries.” He also says that the decay of trade in the “dead cities” is partly attributable to the supineness of the inhabitants themselves, though that certainly does not tally with their enterprising spirit of old, and adds that Amsterdam, when threatened with the same danger—the moving sands and the encroaching waters, which have turned the harbors of the once wealthy Hanseatic cities into deserts—did not “sleep,” but “with all their ancient energy, not fearing to expend their wealth,” the inhabitants “cut through the whole length of the peninsula of Noord Holland, and created a canal 40 miles long and 120 feet wide, wide enough for two frigates to pass one another”; and when that was found insufficient for their commerce, “they again cut through the width of the peninsula, as they had cut through its length, giving toships of the heaviest tonnage two roads to their magnificent port. This was how the sons of old Batavia fought against the elements—nothing stopped them; and we see that the generations which succeed them are animated by the same spirit, the same firm will, the same calm energy, never to be beaten by difficulties.” And now the last news of importance from the same spot is that of the projected draining of the Zuyder-Zee, which is a plan of gigantic magnitude, the cost being estimated at£16,000,000 sterling—i.e., not far from $100,000,000—but the allotted time scarcely more than two years. The Dutch is a race tenacious of vitality and power, and its future in its colonial empire, which it is now thoroughly and scientifically surveying, bids fair to rival its past. Even these “dead cities,” when they cease to be fishing hamlets and relic-museums, and, by the draining of the inland sea, have to turn for their support to new industries, have a chance of revival. The last marvellous Dutch work—the completion of the North Sea Canal—is a proof that the old energy is yet there, and that great things may yet be expected, nautically, scientifically, commercially, and even agriculturally, of the sturdy old stock of the “Sea Beggars.”

[195]The Dead Cities of the Zuyder-Zee: A voyage to the picturesque side of Holland. By Henri Havard. Translated by Annie Wood. London: Bentley & Son.

[196]The author has unfortunately omitted to give some of these proofs, and we have only his word for this assertion.

[197]Probablylightest.

[198]Cornelius Kempius.

Back to IndexNext