You may expect some account of this country, and though I am not well qualified for such an undertaking, yet shall I endeavour to satisfy some part of your expectations.  Nothing surprised me more than the books every day published, descriptive of the manners of this country.  Any young man who takes it into his head to publish his travels, visits the countries he intends to describe; passes through them with as much inattention as his valet de chambre; and consequently not having a fund himself to fill a volume, he applies to those who wrote before him, and gives us the manners of a country, not as he must have seen them, but such as they might have been fifty years before.  The modern Dutchman is quite a different creature from him of former times; he in everything imitates a Frenchman but in his easy disengaged air, which is the result of keeping polite company.  The Dutchman is vastly ceremonious, and is perhaps exactly what a Frenchman might have been in the reign of Louis XIV.  Such are the better-bred.  But the downright Hollander is one of the oddest figures in nature.  Upon a head of lank hair he wears a half-cocked narrow hat laced with black ribbon:  no coat, but seven waistcoats, and nine pairs of breeches; so that his hips reach almost up to his armpits.  This well-clothed vegetable is now fit to see company, or make love.  But what a pleasing creature is the object of his appetite?  Why, she wears a large fur cap with a deal of Flanders lace:  for every pair of breeches he carries, she puts on two petticoats.

A Dutch lady burns nothing about her phlegmatic admirer but his tobacco.  You must know, Sir, every woman carries in her hand a stove with coals in it, which, when she sits, she snugs under her petticoats; and at this chimney dozing Strephon lights his pipe.  I take it that this continual smoking is what gives the man the ruddy healthful complexion he generally wears, by draining his superfluous moisture, while the woman, deprived of this amusement, overflows with such viscidities as tint the complexion, and give that paleness of visage which low fenny grounds and moist air conspire to cause.  A Dutch woman and Scotch 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.  I shall not endeavour to deprive either country of its share of beauty; but must say, that of all objects on this earth, an English farmer’s daughter is most charming.  Every woman there is a complete beauty, while the higher class of women want many of the requisites to make them even tolerable.  Their pleasures here are very dull, though very various.  You may smoke, you may doze; you may go to the Italian comedy, as good an amusement as either of the former.  This entertainment always brings in Harlequin, who is generally a magician, and in consequence of his diabolical art performs a thousand tricks on the rest of the persons of the drama, who are all fools.  I have seen the pit in a roar of laughter at this humour, when with his sword he touches the glass from which another was drinking.  ’Twas not his face they laughed at, for that was masked.  They must have seen something vastly queer in the wooden sword, that neither I, nor you, Sir, were you there, could see.