called Oom Jan or
Uncle John.

There is still another phrase, "Dutch news," which might be
explained. The term is given by printers to very difficult copy--Dean
Stanley's manuscript, for example, was probably known as Dutch news,
so terrible was his hand,--and also to "pie". The origin is to be
found in the following paragraph from _Notes and Queries_. (The Sir
Richard Phillips concerned was the vegetarian publisher so finely
touched off by Borrow in _Lavengro_.)

In his youth Sir Richard Phillips edited and published a paper at
Leicester, called the _Herald_. One day an article appeared in it
headed 'Dutch Mail,' and added to it was an announcement that it had
arrived too late for translation, and so had been cut up and printed
in the original. This wondrous article drove half of England crazy,
and for years the best Dutch scholars squabbled and pored over it
without being able to arrive at any idea of what it meant. This famous
'Dutch Mail' was, in reality, merely a column of pie. The story Sir
Richard tells of this particular pie he had a whole hand in is this:--

"One evening, before one of our publications, my men and a boy
overturned two or three columns of the paper in type. We had to
get ready in some way for the coaches, which, at four o'clock in the
morning, required four or five hundred papers. After every exertion we
were short nearly a column; but there stood on the galleys a tempting
column of pie. It suddenly struck me that this might be thought
Dutch. I made up the column, overcame the scruples of the foreman,
and so away the country edition went with its philological puzzle,
to worry the honest agricultural reader's head. There was plenty of
time to set up a column of plain English for the local edition." Sir
Richard tells of one man whom he met in Nottingham who for thirty-four
years preserved a copy of the Leicester _Herald_, hoping that some
day the matter would be explained.

I doubt if any one nation is braver than any other; and the fact that
from Holland we get the contemptuous term "Dutch courage," meaning
the courage which is dependent upon spirits (originally as supplied
to malefactors about to mount the scaffold), is no indication that
the Dutch lack bravery. To one who inquired as to the derivation of
the phrase a poet unknown to me thus replied, somewhen in the reign
of William IV. The retort, I think, was sound:--

Do _you_ ask what is Dutch courage?
Ask the Thames, and