Goldsmith, who spent his life in doing characteristic things—­few men have done more—­when once he had determined to go to Holland, took a passage in a vessel bound for Bordeaux.  At Newcastle-on-Tyne, however, on going ashore to be merry, he was arrested as a Jacobite and thrown into prison for a fortnight.  The result was that the ship sailed without him.  It was just as well for him and for us, for it sank at the mouth of the Garonne.  In 1755, however, he was in Leyden, although by what route, circuitous or direct, he reached that city we do not know.

He lost little time in giving his Uncle Contarine an account of his impressions of Holland and its people.  Here is a portion of a long letter:  “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 arm-pits.  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:  and 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 women 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 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.