der--Jacob Cats--Homely wisdom--President Kruger--A
monstrous resort--Giant snails--The black-headed
mannikins--The etiquette of petticoats--Katwyk--The old
Rhine--Noordwyk--Noordwyk-Binnen.

Good Dutchmen when they die go to Scheveningen; but my heaven is
elsewhere. To go thither is, however, no calamity, so long as one
chooses the old road. It is being there that so lowers the spirits. The
Oude Scheveningen Weg is perhaps the pleasantest, and certainly the
shadiest, road in Holland: not one avenue but many, straight as a
line in Euclid. On either side is a spreading wood, among the trees
of which, on the left hand, as one leaves The Hague, is Sorgh Vliet,
once the retreat of old Jacob Cats, lately one of the residences of a
royal Duke, and now sold to a building company. The road dates from
1666, its projector being Constantin Huyghens, poet and statesman,
whose statue may be seen at the half-way halting-place. By the time
this is reached the charm of the road is nearly over: thenceforward
it is all villas and Scheveningen.

But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet (which has the
same meaning as _Sans Souci_), where two hundred years ago lived
in genial retirement the writer who best represents the shrewd
sagacity of the Dutch character--Jacob Cats, or Vader Cats as he was
affectionately called, the author of the Dutch "Household Bible,"
a huge miscellaneous collection of wise saws and modern instances,
humour and satire, upon all the businesses of life.

Mr. Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all he touches, has
described in his _Side-Walk Studies_ the huge, illustrated edition
of Cats' Works (Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly
constituted old-fashioned Dutch households. I have seen it at the
British Museum, and it seems to me to be one of the best picture-books
in the world.

As Mr. Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced in it. "What
would one not give for such an illustrated copy of Shakespeare! In
these pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of the
seventeenth century:--its vanes and spires and steep-roofed houses;
its gardens with their geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped
alleys and arches, their shining parallelograms of water. Here are
its old-fashioned interiors, with the deep fire-places and queer
andirons, the huge four-posters, the prim portraits on the wall, the
great brass-clamped coffers and carved _armories_ for the r