How this university answered to the hopes of Leyden, it is superfluous to say.  Everybody knows how the States of Holland with their liberal offers drew learned men from every country; how philosophy, driven out of France, took refuge there; how Leyden was for a long time the securest citadel for all men who were struggling for the triumph of human reason; how it became at length the most famous school in Europe.  The actual university is in an ancient convent.  One can not enter without a sentiment of profound respect the great hall of the Academic Senate, where are seen the portraits of all the professors who have succeeded each other from the foundation of the university up to the present day.

DORTRECHT[A]

[Footnote A:  From “Sketches in Holland and Scandinavia.”]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C.  HARE

Our morning at Dortrecht was very delightful, and it is a thoroughly charming place.  Passing under a dark archway in a picturesque building of Charles V., opposite the hotel, we found ourselves at once on the edge of an immense expanse of shimmering river, with long, rich meadows beyond, between which the wide flood breaks into three different branches.  Red and white sails flit down them.  Here and there rises a line of pollard willows or clipt elms, and now and then a church spire.  On the nearest shore an ancient windmill, colored in delicate tints of gray and yellow, surmounts a group of white buildings.

On the left is a broad esplanade of brick, lined with ancient houses, and a canal with a bridge, the long arms of which are ready to open at a touch and give a passage to the great yellow-masted barges, which are already half intercepting the bright red house-fronts ornamented with stone, which belong to some public buildings facing the end of the canal.  With what a confusion of merchandise are the boats laden, and how gay is the coloring, between the old weedy posts to which they are moored!

It was from hence that Isabella of France, with Sir John de Hainault and many other faithful knights set on their expedition against Edward II. and the government of the Spencers.

From the busy port, where nevertheless they are dredging, we cross another bridge and find ourselves in a quietude like that of a cathedral close in England.  On one side is a wide pool half covered with floating timber, and, in the other half, reflecting like a mirror the houses on the opposite shore, with their bright gardens of lilies and hollyhocks, and trees of mountain ash, which bend their masses of scarlet berries to the still water.  Between the houses are glints of blue river and of inevitable windmills on the opposite shore.  And all this we observe standing in the shadow of a huge church, the Groote Kerk, with a nave of the fourteenth century, and a choir of the fifteenth and a gigantic trick tower, in which three long Gothic arches, between octagonal tourelles, enclose several tiers of windows.  At the top is a great clock, and below the church a grove of elms, through which fitful sunlight falls on the grass and the dead red of the brick pavement (so grateful to feet sore with the sharp stones of other Dutch cities), where groups of fishermen are collecting in their blue shirts and white trousers.