The Project Gutenberg EBook of Walter Pieterse, by Multatuli

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: Walter Pieterse
A Story of Holland

Author: Multatuli

Translator: Hubert Evans

Release Date: September 29, 2009 [EBook #30135]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WALTER PIETERSE ***

Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net/ (This book was produced from scanned
images of public domain material from the Google Print
project.)

Walter Pieterse
A Story of Holland

By
Multatuli
(Eduard Douwes Dekker)

Translated by
Hubert Evans, Ph. D.

New York
Friderici & Gareis
6 East Seventeenth Street

Copyright, 1904,
By
Friderici & Gareis

PREFACE

Most of us know that The Hague is somewhere in Holland; and we all
know that Queen Wilhelmina takes a beautiful picture; but to how many
of us has it occurred that the land of Spinoza and Rembrandt is still
running a literary shop?

How many of us have ever heard of Eduard Douwes Dekker? Very few,
I fear, except professional critics. And yet, the man who, forty
years ago, became famous as Multatuli (I have borne much), was not
only the greatest figure in the modern literature of the Netherlands,
but one of the most powerful and original writers in the literature
of the world. An English critic has called him the Heine of Holland;
Anatole France calls him the Voltaire of the Netherlands.

Eduard Douwes Dekker was born in 1820, at Amsterdam, his father being
the captain of a merchantman trading in the Dutch colonies. At the age
of eighteen Dekker sailed on his father's vessel for the East Indies,
determined to abandon the business career that had been mapped out for
him and enter the colonial service. In 1839 he received a clerkship
in the