t an extent of lush meadows, how many navigable
rivers! Nowhere are so many towns crowded together within so small an
area; not large towns, indeed, but excellently governed. Their
cleanliness is praised by everybody. Nowhere are such large numbers of
moderately learned persons found, though extraordinary and exquisite
erudition is rather rare.'

They were Erasmus's own most cherished ideals which he here ascribes to
his compatriots--gentleness, sincerity, simplicity, purity. He sounds
that note of love for Holland on other occasions. When speaking of lazy
women, he adds: 'In France there are large numbers of them, but in
Holland we find countless wives who by their industry support their
idling and revelling husbands'. And in the colloquy entitled 'The
Shipwreck', the people who charitably take in the castaways are
Hollanders. 'There is no more humane people than this, though surrounded
by violent nations.'

In addressing English readers it is perhaps not superfluous to point out
once again that Erasmus when speaking of Holland, or using the epithet
'Batavian', refers to the county of Holland, which at present forms the
provinces of North and South Holland of the kingdom of the Netherlands,
and stretches from the Wadden islands to the estuaries of the Meuse.
Even the nearest neighbours, such as Zealanders and Frisians, are not
included in this appellation.

But it is a different matter when Erasmus speaks of _patria_, the
fatherland, or of _nostras_, a compatriot. In those days a national
consciousness was just budding all over the Netherlands. A man still
felt himself a Hollander, a Frisian, a Fleming, a Brabantine in the
first place; but the community of language and customs, and still more
the strong political influence which for nearly a century had been
exercised by the Burgundian dynasty, which had united most of these low
countries under its sway, had cemented a feeling of solidarity which did
not even halt at the linguistic frontier in Belgium. It was still rather
a strong Burgundian patriotism (even after Habsburg had _de facto_
occupied the place of Burgundy) than a strictly Netherlandish feeling of
nationality. People liked, by using a heraldic symbol, to designate the
Netherlander as 'the Lions'. Erasmus, too, employs the term. In his
works we gradually see the narrower Hollandish patriotism gliding into
the Burgundian Netherlandish. In the beginning, _patria_ with him still
means Holland proper, but soo