Evelyn records an amusing experience at Leyden in August, 1641:  “I was brought acquainted with a Burgundian Jew, who had married an apostate Kentish woman.  I asked him divers questions; he told me, amongst other things, that the World should never end, that our souls transmigrated, and that even those of the most holy persons did penance in the bodies of brutes after death, and so he interpreted the banishment and savage life of Nebuchadnezzar; that all the Jews should rise again, and be led to Jerusalem; that the Romans only were the occasion of our Saviour’s death, whom he affirmed (as the Turks do) to be a great prophet, but not the Messiah.  He showed me several books of their devotion, which he had translated into English for the instruction of his wife; he told me that when the Messiah came, all the ships, barks, and vessels of Holland should, by the power of certain strange whirlwinds, be loosed from their anchors, and transported in a moment to all the desolate ports and havens throughout the world, wherever the dispersion was, to convey their brethren and tribes to the Holy City; with other such-like stuff.  He was a merry drunken fellow, but would by no means handle any money (for something I purchased of him), it being Saturday; but desired me to leave it in the window, meaning to receive it on Sunday morning.”

In an old book-shop at Leyden I bought from an odd lot of English books, chiefly minor fiction for travellers, the Colloquia Peripatetica of John Duncan, LL.D., Professor of Hebrew in the New College, Edinburgh.  “I’m first a Christian, next a Catholic, then a Calvinist, fourth a Paedo-baptist, and fifth a Presbyterian.  I cannot reverse the order,” is one of his emphatic utterances.  Here are others, not unconnected with the country we are travelling in:  “Poor Erasmus truckled all his life for a hat.  If he could only have been made a cardinal!  You see the longing for it in his very features, and can’t help regarding him with mingled respect and pity.”  Of Thomas a Kempis, the recluse of Deventer:  “A fine fellow, but hazy, and weak betimes.  He and his school tend (as some one has well said) to make humility and humiliation change places.”  Finally, of the Bible:  “The three best translations of the Bible, in my opinion, are, in order of merit, the English, the Dutch, and Diodati’s Italian version.  As to Luther, he is admirable in rendering the prophets.  He says either just what the prophets did say, or that which you see at once they might have said.”

Leyden has two vast churches, St. Peter’s and St. Pancras’s.  Both are immense and unadorned, I think that St. Pancras’s is the lightest church I was ever in.  St. Peter’s ought to be filled with memorials of the town’s illustrious sons, but it has few.  As I have said elsewhere, I asked in vain for the grave of Jan Steen, who was buried here.