One of the pleasantest buildings in Leyden is the Meermansburg—­a spreading almshouse in the Oude Vest, surrounding a square garden with a massive pump in the midst.  A few pictures are shown in the Governors’ room over the entrance, but greater interest attaches to the little domiciles for the pensioners of the Meerman trust.  A friendly concierge with a wooden leg showed us one of these compact houses—­a sitting-room with a bed-cupboard in one wall, and below it a little larder, like the cabin of a ship.  At the back a tiny range, and above, a garret.  One could be very comfortable in such quarters.

Leyden has other hofjes, as these homes of rest are called, into one of which, gay with geraniums, I peeped—­a little court of clean cottages seen through the doorway like a Peter de Hooch.

I did not, I fear, do my duty by Leyden’s many museums.  The sun shone; the boats swam continually down the Old Rhine and the New; and the sea at Katwyk and Noordwyk sent a call across the intervening meadows.  Some day perhaps I shall find myself at Leyden again, when the sky is grey and the thirst for information is more strongly upon me.  Ethnography, comparative anatomy, physiology—­there is nothing that may not be learned in the Leyden museums; but such learning is not peculiarly Dutch, nor are the treasures of these museums peculiarly Dutch, and I felt that I might with a clear conscience leave them to others.  Have we not Bloomsbury?

I did, however, climb the Burg, which is a circular fortress on a mound between the two rivers, so cleverly hidden away among houses that it was long ere I could find it.  It is gained through an ancient courtyard full of horses and carriages—­like a scene in Dumas.  From the Burg one ought to have a fine view, but Leyden’s roofs are too near.  And in the Natural History Museum I walked through miles of birds stuffed, and birds articulated, until I felt that I could give a year’s income to be on terms again with a living blackbird—­even one of those that eat our Kentish strawberries at sunrise.

I did not penetrate to the interior of the University, having none to guide me, but I was pleased to remember that Oliver Goldsmith had been a student there not so very long ago.  Indeed, as I walked about the town, I thought much of Goldsmith as he was in 1755, aged twenty-seven, with all his books to write, wandering through the same streets, looking upon the same houses and canals, in the interval of acquiring his mysterious medical degree (ultimately conferred at Louwain).  His ingenious project, it will be remembered—­by those whose memories (like my own) cling to that order of information, to the exclusion of everything useful and improving—­Goldsmith’s delightful plan for subsistence in Holland was to teach the English language to the Dutch, and in return receive enough money to keep him at the University of Leyden and enable him to hear the great Professor Albinus.  It was not until he reached Holland that those adorable Irish brains of his realised that he who teaches English to a Dutchman must first know Dutch.