“In winter, when their canals are frozen, every house is forsaken, and all people are on the ice; sleds drawn by horses, and skating, are at that time the reigning amusements.  They have boats here that slide on the ice, and are driven by the winds.  When they spread all their sails they go more than a mile and a half a minute, and their motion is so rapid the eye can scarcely accompany them.  Their ordinary manner of travelling is very cheap and very convenient:  they sail in covered boats drawn by horses; and in these you are sure to meet people of all nations.  Here the Dutch slumber, the French chatter, and the English play at cards.  Any man who likes company may have them to his taste.  For my part I generally detached myself from all society, and was wholly taken up in observing the face of the country.  Nothing can equal its beauty; wherever I turn my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, grottos, vistas, presented themselves; but when you enter their towns you are charmed beyond description.  No misery is to be seen here; every one is usefully employed.

“Scotland and this country bear the highest contrast.  There hills and rocks intercept every prospect:  here ’tis all a continued plain.  There you might see a well-dressed duchess issuing from a dirty close; and here a dirty Dutchman inhabiting a palace.  The Scotch may be compared to a tulip planted in dung; but I never see a Dutchman in his own house but I think of a magnificent Egyptian temple dedicated to an ox.  Physic is by no means here taught so well as in Edinburgh:  and in all Leyden there are but four British students, owing to all necessaries being so extremely dear and the professors so very lazy (the chemical professor excepted) that we don’t much care to come hither.”

When the time came to make the “Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning” Leyden had to suffer.  Goldsmith laid about him with no gentle hand.  “Holland, at first view, appears to have some pretensions to polite learning.  It may be regarded as the great emporium, not less of literature than of every other commodity.  Here, though destitute of what may be properly called a language of their own, all the languages are understood, cultivated and spoken.  All useful inventions in arts, and new discoveries in science, are published here almost as soon as at the places which first produced them.  Its individuals have the same faults, however, with the Germans, of making more use of their memory than their judgment.  The chief employment of their literati is to criticise, or answer, the new performances which appear elsewhere.

“A dearth of wit in France or England naturally produces a scarcity in Holland.  What Ovid says of Echo may be applied here,

——­’nec reticere loquenti, Nec prior ipsa loqui didicit’——­

they wait till something new comes out from others; examine its merits and reject it, or make it reverberate through the rest of Europe.