was keenly alive to women's personal gifts.
"A Dutchwoman and a Scotch woman," he
writes, " will well bear an opposition. The
one is pale and fat, the other lean and
ruddy. The one walks as if she were
straddling after a go-cart, and the other takes too
masculine a stride."

Thus far the gentle Goldy, never rough
and ready with his pen; who would not write
a harsh thing of his enemy. Yet it is plain
he had no great love of that people; neither,
for that matter, had Andrew Marvell,
Esquire, late member of the Honourable
House of Commons, as may be gathered from
his poems, imprinted for Robert Boulter at
the Turk's Head, in Cornhill, a grim effigy of
the late Andrew Marvell, Esquire, in
unlimited periwig to face the title-page. Says
Andrew Marvell,—in no complimentary
humour certainly, but then it was about
the time that Robert Blake, captain and
admiral at sea, with Dean and other famous
seamen, had been sinking Dutch men-of-war
by the dozen; says Andrew Marvell, Holland
is a country which scarce deserves the name
of land, being but "th' offscouring of British
sand,—no more than so much earth as was
contributed by English pilots when they
heaved the lead! " Then, stringing most
disreputable puns, he adds: " Nor can civility
there want for tillage, Where wisely for a
court they choose a village. How fit a title
clothes their governors, Themselves the Hogo,
as all their subjects Bores! " Grim commonwealth
humour, this: such as my Lord Protector
would have chuckled a sour smile
over! The notion of likening their High
Mightinesses— the awful Hoogen Mogen— to
hogs! Just as in the great French war, our
British public would shriek with laughter over
those funny Buonaparte caricaturas, sent out
by that droll Mr. Gilray, wherein the
Corsican upstart was portrayed, ridiculously, in
green swallow-tailed coat, and absurd cocked
hat, led along by John Bull, glorious and
immortal. How many of those caricatures, as
well as of lean Frenchmen eating frogs, or
themselves furnishing a meal to John, who
takes up three or four of them on the point
of his fork, the ingenious Mr. Gilray
coloured with his own hand, and sent out
during that eventful time, may now be seen
in the scrap-books of collectors, and on old
country house screens; on which you may
follow the whole career of the Upstart in
his green swallow tails. It is certainly worthy
of note that, in what Mr. Carlyle calls the late
Turk-Russian business, no phobia of this sort
took hold of the public mind.

To return to Andrew Marvell, Esquire: It
does not please me that he alludes to my
little Dutchwoman, in this unhandsome
fashion. "See," the ungallant Cromwellian
calls out, "See but their mairmaids with their
tails of fish, Reeking at church over the chafing
dish. A vestal turf enshrined in earthenware
Fumes through the loopholes of wooden
Square." Nor doth he over-relish my Dutchman:
"For what a spectacle the skipper gross,
A water Hercules, butter-coloss. Turned up
with all their several towns of beer." But
though a little wroth with Andrew Marvell,
Esquire, I cannot turn my ears from his
sweet verse that tinkles melodiously like
silver bells; and I wonder how the blunt,
rude man, that so delighted in rude jokes
on his Dutch enemies, could tune his soul to
such soft conceits, such delicate and
gossamer images.

I think, too, of M. Voltaire, how he, too,
had come that road. How, when he has
done with them, and picked his last footstep
out of the country, he turns about, and with
that sneering mouth of his relaxed, takes off
his hat in mockery with that alliterative
farewell of his, "Adieu, canaux, canards, canaille!"
that is to say, " Good bye, ducks, dykes, and
dregs! " To him they might have replied,
conveniently, as did the Hoogen with their
counter-medal to the great Lewis, "Adieu,
scoffs, sneers, and snarls! " They were well
rid of him, to my mind.

Then I think of Peter the Great and his
sojourn, and I speculate as to how the Barbarian
found the people. Much to his liking, I
suspect. Much more to his liking must have
been the strong waters of the country: the
spirit made at Schiedam and such places.
He was a Boor himself as to habits; and,
therefore, Boors could not have jarred very
unpleasantly on his feelings. Naturally
enough the thought of Peter brings me to
Zaardam or Saardam, and it enters into my
head to go as a pilgrim to that little town—
barely an hour's travel distant.

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