Rotterdam, it must be said here, is, in commercial importance, the first city in Holland after Amsterdam.  It was already a flourishing town in the thirteenth century.  Ludovico Guicciardini, in his work on the Low Countries, adduces a proof of the wealth of the city in the sixteenth century, saying that in one year nine hundred houses that had been destroyed by fire were rebuilt.  Bentivoglio, in his history of the war in Flanders, calls it “the largest and most mercantile of the lands of Holland.”  But its greatest prosperity did not begin until 1830, or after the separation of Holland and Belgium, when Rotterdam seemed to draw to herself everything that was lost by her rival, Antwerp.

Her situation is extremely advantageous.  She communicates with the sea by the Meuse, which brings to her ports in a few hours the largest merchantmen; and by the same river she communicates with the Rhine, which brings to her from the Swiss mountains and Bavaria immense quantities of timber—­entire forests that come to Holland to be transformed into ships, dikes, and villages.  More than eighty splendid vessels come and go, in the space of nine months, between Rotterdam and India.  Merchandise flows in from all sides in such great abundance that a large part of it has to be distributed through the neighboring towns....

Rotterdam, in short, has a future more splendid than that of Amsterdam, and has long been regarded as a rival by her elder sister.  She does not possess the wealth of the capital; but is more industrious in increasing what she has; she dares, risks, undertakes like a young and adventurous city.  Amsterdam, like a merchant grown cautious after having made his fortune by hazardous undertakings, begins to doze over her treasures.  At Rotterdam fortunes are made; at Amsterdam they are consolidated; at the Hague they are spent....

In the middle of the market-place, surrounded by heaps of vegetables, fruit, and earthenware pots and pans, stands the statue of Desiderius Erasmus, the first literary light of Holland; that Gerrit Gerritz—­for he assumed the Latin name himself, according to the custom of writers in his day—­that Gerrit Gerritz belonged, by his education, his style, and his ideas, to the family of the humanists and erudite of Italy; a fine writer, profound and indefatigable in letters and science, he filled all Europe with his name between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; he was loaded with favors by the popes, and sought after and entertained by princes; and his “Praise of Folly,” written in Latin like the rest of his innumerable works, and dedicated to Sir Thomas More, is still read.  The bronze statue, erected in 1622, represents Erasmus drest in a furred gown, with a cap of the same, a little bent forward as if walking, and in the act of reading a large book, held open in the hand; the pedestal bears a double inscription, in Dutch and Latin, calling him, “The Foremost Man of His Century,” and “The Most Excellent