rivel thus? "There but for the grace
of God goes England"--is that a reasonable utterance?

One sees the difference concretely as one passes from these many
Corporation and Regent pieces in the galleries of Holland to the
living Dutchmen of the streets. I saw it particularly at Haarlem
on a streaming wet day, after hurrying from the Museum to the
Cafe Brinkmann through some inches of water. At a table opposite,
sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals'
arquebusiers. Yet how unlike. For the air of masterful recklessness had
gone, that good-humoured glint of power in the eye was no more. Hals
had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these
coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss. Where once was
authority is now calculation.

I quote a little poem by Mr. Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht,
which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have
not forgotten:--

The shell, when put to child-like ears,
Yet murmurs of its bygone years,
In echoes of the sea;
The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound,
And ponders o'er its mystic ground
And wondrous memory.

Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells,
Which, like the ever-mindful shells,
Yet murmurs of the sea:
That sea, of ours in times of yore,
And, when De Ruyter went before,
Our road to victory.

Chapter X

Amsterdam

The Venice of the North--The beauty of gravity--No place for
George Dyer--The Keizersgracht--Kalverstraat and Warmoes
Straat--The Ghetto--Pile-driving--Erasmus's sarcasm--The
new Bourse--Learning the city--Tramway perplexities--The
unnecessary guide--The Royal Palace--The New Church--Stained
glass--The Old Church--The five carpets--Wedding customs--Dutch
wives to-day and in the past--The Begijnenhof--The new
religion and the old--The Burgerweesmeisjes--The Eight
Orange Blossoms--Dutch music halls--A Dutch Hamlet--The fish
market--Rembrandt's grave--A nation of shopkeepers--_Max
Havelaar_--Mr. Drystubble's device--Lothario and Betsy--The
English in Holland and the Dutch in England--Athleticism--A
people on skates--The chaperon's perplexity--Love on the level.

Amsterdam is notable for two possessions above others: its old
canals and its old pictures. Truly has it been called the Venice
of the North; but very different is its sombre quietude from the
sunny Italian city amon