“to the life” of this people:  “Their habitations are kept handsomer than their bodies, and their bodies than their soules".—­“The Dutch man’s building is not large, but neat; handsome on the outside, on the inside hung with pictures and tapestry.  He that hath not bread to eat hath a picture.”—­“They are seldom deceived, for they will trust nobody.  They may always deceive, for you must trust them, as for instance, if you travel, to ask a bill of Particulars is to purre in a wasp’s nest, you must pay what they ask as sure as if it were the assessment of a Subsidy.”

But the wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen Feltham, from whom I quote later.  His little book on the Low Countries is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope:  the first half of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic.  It is he who charges the Dutch convivial spirits with drinking down the Evening Starre and drinking up the Morning Starre.

The old literature tells us also that the Dutch were not always clean.  Indeed, their own painters prove this:  Ostade pre-eminently.  There are many allusions in Elizabethan and early Stuart literature to their dirt and rags.  In Earle’s Microcosmography, for example, a younger brother’s last refuge is said to be the Low Countries, “where rags and linen are no scandal”.  But better testimony comes perhaps from The English Schole-Master, a seventeenth-century Dutch-English manual, from which I quote at some length later in this book.  Here is a specimen scrap of dialogue:—­

S. May it please you to give me leave to go out?  M. Whither?  S. Home.  M. How is it that you goe so often home?  S. My mother commanded that I and my brother should come to her this day.  M. For what cause?  S. That our mayd may beat out our clothes.  M. What is that to say?  Are you louzie?  S. Yea, very louzie.

Sir William Temple, the patron of Swift, the husband of Dorothy Osborne, and our ambassador at The Hague—­where he talked horticulture, cured his gout by the remedy known as Moxa, and collected materials for the leisurely essays and memoirs that were to be written at Moor Park—­knew the Dutch well and wrote of them with much particularity.  In his Observations upon the United Provinces he says this:  “Holland is a country, where the earth is better than the air, and profit more in request than honour; where there is more sense than wit; more good nature than good humour, and more wealth than pleasure:  where a man would chuse rather to travel than to live; shall find more things to observe than desire; and more persons to esteem than to love.  But the same qualities and dispositions do not value a private man and a state, nor make a conversation agreeable, and a government great:  nor is it unlikely, that some very great King might make but a very ordinary private gentleman, and some very extraordinary gentleman might be capable of making but a very mean Prince.”