Leyden

“ Leyden is a paradise of clean, quiet streets—a city of professors, students and soldiers. It has, I think, the prettiest red roofs in any considerable Dutch town: not prettier than Veere’s, but Veere is now only a village. Philosophers surely live here: book-worms to whom yesterday, to-day and to-morrow are one. The sense of commercial enterprise dies away: whatever they are at Amsterdam, the Dutch at Leyden cease to be a nation of shopkeepers. ”

“ Then a flabby-jowled, paunchy fellow urged in throaty gutturals:
"Come, Leyden, tell us about the new flame. It's too good to keep to yourself. She's a good girl, isn't she—as yet?"
No attempt was made to keep the conversation private. The whole party oozed a blatant superiority over any possible audience, easily traceable to the copious flow of schnapps at their table. Leyden alone, Barry noticed, drank nothing. A roar greeted the last speaker's shrewd hint at Leyden's reputation as a ladies' man, which he replied to by taking a fat wallet from his breast pocket. ”

“ Many of the best men of England have studied at Leyden; and if you read the lives of Evelyn and Goldsmith, you will find they were much attached to this place. Boerhaave, the great physician, was a professor here, and go were Arminius and his rival Gomarus. Gerard Dow or Douw, Jan Steen, and Vandervelde, the artists, were born here. Near Leyden the Rhine enters the sea, by the aid of a canal and sluice gates; and here are great salt works, carried on by evaporation. From Leyden we took the rail to Harlem, eighteen miles ”

“ The waters advanced; the Spaniards began to abandon the lower fortifications; the inhabitants of Leyden continually climbed the tower to watch the sea, now hoping, now despairing, and never ceased to work at the walls, to make sorties, and to repulse attacks. At last the Prince of Orange got well, and preparations for the deliverance of Leyden, which during his illness had gone on but slowly, were now resumed with vigor. On the 1st of September the people of Leyden, from the top of their tower, saw appear upon the distant waters the first Dutch vessels. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Giles, receiving guests, intimate friends, conventional folk, at his father's door would have been less at his ease.
The tableau was greeted by an instant of involuntary silence. "Ach!" muttered Leyden, beneath his breath. "That is fine ... that spectacle. I did not think that he had it in him, this negro." Like many men who spend much of their lives in solitude of thought, Leyden had the habit of audible self-communing when suddenly impressed. Virginia overheard him.
Then Dessalines did a graceful thing; a Gallic action. He threw out both great arms, the massive head went back. ”

“ To reward Leyden for her heroic defense, he left her her choice between exemption from certain imposts or the foundation of a university. Leyden chose the university.
How this university answered to the hopes of Leyden, it is superfluous to say. Everybody knows how the States of Holland with their liberal offers drew learned men from every country; how philosophy, driven out of France, took refuge there; how Leyden was for a long time the securest citadel for all men who were struggling for the triumph of human reason; how it became at length the most famous school in Europe. ”

“ It is better to die of hunger than of shame. Your threats do not move me. I can die but once. Kill me, if you will, and satiate your hunger on my flesh; but while I live do not ask me to surrender Leyden!" The crowd, moved by his words, dispersed in silence, resigned to death, and the defence went on. At last, on the night of the 1st of October, a violent tempest of wind burst out; the sea rose, overwhelmed the ruined dykes, and furiously invaded the land. At midnight, when the tempest was at its height, in profound darkness, the Dutch fleet once more set sail. ”

“ Time and accident had changed him; moreover, he could bring art to the assistance of nature. In Leyden, too, he had confederates--Black Meg to wit, for one; also he had funds, for was he not the treasurer of the company that this very morning had achieved so remarkable and unsought-for an ascension?
There was only one thing against the scheme. In Leyden lived Lysbeth van Goorl and her husband, and with them a certain young man whose parentage he could guess. More, her son Foy knew the hiding-place of Brant's hoard, and from him or his servant Martin that secret must be won. ”

“ Thus was Leyden saved after enduring a siege of five months, having experienced sufferings never surpassed by any recorded on the page of history. The Prince was the first to acknowledge the deep debt of gratitude Holland owed to the heroic fortitude of the noble burgomaster and his fellow-citizens. The people of Holland and Zealand, to show how much they were indebted to the citizens, established that university which, thus founded at the darkest period of their country’s struggle, was in after times to become so celebrated. ”

“ Soon it ceased, and Leyden rejoined me.
"There is to be a dance," said he, "but it is a small affair."
"Was that you talking from below?" I asked.
"Yes. I stood back in the shadow, and the fellow thought that he was speaking with one of the black gang. They do not like to discuss the bamboula with leblancs."
"Your imitation was extraordinary. If I had not suspected what you were up to I could have sworn that it was one of the Haytian boatmen talking. You must have lived in this country." ”

“ In Leyden, and not in Amsterdam or Rotterdam, as one might suppose, I came across a beggar for the first time in Holland, although technically, he came across me. The atmosphere of book learning was probably what launched him on his career, for he certainly seemed able-bodied enough to make a [100] more honest living by the sweat of his brow; but the people of Leyden are not given much to fluent perspiration. And it might be here mentioned that one of the reliefs of travel in Holland, compared with Italy, for example, is its dearth of mendicants and beggars. ”

“ Before his departure for the East, Leyden finished his longest poem, the "Scenes of Infancy," the publication of which he entrusted to his friend, Dr Thomas Brown. His last winter in Britain he passed in London, enjoying the society of many distinguished men of letters, to whom he was introduced by his former friend, Mr Richard Heber. He sailed for India [95] on the 7th April 1803, and arrived at Madras on the 19th August. In Hindostan, his talents and extraordinary capabilities in forming an acquaintance with the native tongues gained him numerous friends. ”

“ Yet, as Oxford men are rarely discourteous, it was feared by some that they were imperfectly informed as to where Leyden was and what Leyden had done. And yet Leyden is certainly the most celebrated and the most meritorious university in Europe. There is no other centre of education which has so often been the home of the first man of his day. From the days of Scaliger and Boerhaave down to the present day, when Leyden can boast of the best Greek scholar in Europe, this has frequently been the case. ”

“ The annual stipend was fixed at two hundred florins. Notwithstanding this honourable reception, Plantin could not make up his mind to remain in Leyden. He was now an old man, and exile from the city with which were connected nearly all the associations of his long years of active life, was probably felt as a hardship. In November, 1585, he transferred the Leyden printing to his son-in-law, Raphelengius (who also succeeded him as Printer to the University) and returned to Antwerp. There he met with criticism from his Catholic friends, who had heard that he had become a heretic. ”

“ To him, there, caught, as he said, "by the foot, like a rabbit in a trap," came the awful news—they still cried these things in streets—of the torpedoing of the Leyden.
He sent his man Day to Liverpool that evening to give help or, at the worst, to send back instant news. The knowledge that Sir James and Lady Grant had taken the first train on the same errand was a thought to lean on.
Yet those next days of waiting! They were followed by the news, wirelessed from the SS. Clonmel, which told of falling in with a handful of Leyden survivors among a boatful of dead. ”

“ Leyden was, in 1580, next to Amsterdam, the most considerable and the most important city in Holland. The heroic resistance that its citizens had made during the long siege by the Spaniards had earned fame for the city throughout all Protestant Europe, while the University, which had been founded by William the Silent in commemoration of the glory of the struggle, had at once secured for itself a prestige among the scholars of Europe, and in making Leyden a centre for the literary activities of the Dutch provinces, had given a great incentive to its publishing and printing trade. ”

“ When Leyden is safe from the Spaniards, then we go to England, not before."
"When Leyden is safe from the Spaniards----" and again the Prince sighed, adding, "well, you have a true heart, young sir, and a right spirit, for which I honour both of you. But I fear that things being thus the Jufvrouw cannot sleep so very peacefully in Norwich after all."
"We must each bear our share of the basket," answered Foy sadly; "I must do the fighting and she the watching." ”

“ Sometimes by a delicate irony he stirred his audience to laughter, but never moved a muscle of his own face. His lecture room was thronged. Men came to Leyden from all parts of the world, who regarded it as a special glory to have been taught by the illustrious Boerhaave. As a writer said of him after his death: "Long was he the oracle of his faculty. Never was preceptor more beloved, professor more celebrated, nor physician more consulted." ”

“ The arms of Leyden are two cross keys, gules in a field argent; and having been entrusted with the power of those keys to bind and to loose,—and moreover to bleed and to blister, to administer at his discretion pills, potions, and powders, and employ the whole artillery of the pharmacopœia,—Daniel returned to Doncaster. The papal keys convey no such general power as the keys of Leyden: they give authority over the conscience and the soul; now it is not every man that has a conscience, or that chuses to keep one ”

“ The windows and doors of most houses are painted green, and the brick-work often white or black, where there are projections or diversity of masonry.
The principal streets of Leyden are broad, long, and well paved, rising in the middle, so that no water can remain upon them, and the same rigid cleanliness prevails here as in other parts of Holland. The street in which the stadthouse is placed, is accounted by the inhabitants of this city one of the finest in Europe. It extends, with an inconsiderable curve, from one extremity of Leyden to the other, and is about two miles in length. ”

“ Notwithstanding these ridiculous or offensive habits, he had considerable talent and great excellences. There is no walk in life, depending on ability, where Leyden could not have shone. Unwearying industry was sustained and inspired by burning enthusiasm. ”

“ Two or three lovely little landscapes, full of air and sunshine and distance, with much sky, make one feel as if a hole in the wall were opened admitting the real view. One of these gives that mixture of ships and trees common in Holland, and another the distant sight of a town amidst formal trees and wide meadows, whose realization we soon came upon in Leyden itself, near a small branch of the Rhine, where a great church rising among the trees and red houses has a sort of simulated look of the hull of a ship reversed, very characteristic of its position. ”

“ The present professors in the university of Leyden are persons of respectable talents and merit; but I am prevented from gaining all the information respecting the university which I hoped to obtain, by the unfortunate absence of the gentleman to whom we had letters of recommendation. The schools of Leyden have suffered in the general calamities which have befallen the republic; and the number of students in the university, particularly of foreigners, is greatly reduced. ”

“ You know, Henry, a bottle weighted to its specific gravity plus; it bobs up in time and when it doesn't it stays down for good, and there is the end of the diving bottle and the aborigine, and money thrown into the ditch for an education ... ha, ha."
Virginia listened, puzzled; the theory she understood of course, but not the man. Leyden appeared genuinely amused at the incident which he had just cited, yet she felt instinctively that he was not a cynic, a scoffer, or a "laughing philosopher." ”

“ Bradford recites that Weston not only urged the Leyden leaders “not to meddle with ye Dutch,” but also,—“not too much to depend on ye Virginia [London] Company,” but to rely on himself and his friends. This strongly suggests active cooperation with Gorges, on Weston’s part, at the outset, with the intent (if he could win them by any means, from allegiance to the First (London) Virginia Company) , to lead the Leyden party, if possible, into Gorges’s hands and under the control and patronage of the Second (or Plymouth) Virginia Company. ”