ounds with thanks to God, and cheerful
songs."[90]

[90] xvii. 449.

These scenes, with their sea-background, their animation, their broad
strokes of the simple, tender, and real in life, may well have been
after Diderot's own heart. He often told me, says Bjoernstaehl, that he
never found the hours pass slowly in the company of a peasant, or a
cobbler, or any handicraftsman, but that he had many a time found them
pass slowly enough in the society of a courtier. "For of the one," he
said, "one can always ask about useful and necessary things, but the
other is mostly, so far as anything useful is concerned, empty and
void."

The characteristics of the European capitals a century ago were believed
to be hit off in the saying, that each of them would furnish the proper
cure for a given defect of character. The over-elegant were to go to
London, savages to Paris, bigots to Berlin, rebels to St. Petersburg,
people who were too sincere to Rome, the over-learned to Brussels, and
people who were too lively to the Hague. Yet the dulness thus charged
against the Hague was not universally admitted. Impartial travellers
assigned to the talk of cultivated circles there a rank not below that
of similar circles in France and England. Some went even farther, and
declared Holland to have a distinct advantage, because people were never
embarrassed either by the levity and sparkling wit of France on the one
hand, nor by the depressing reserve and taciturnity of England on the
other.[91] Yet Holland was fully within the sphere of the great
intellectual commonwealth of the west, and was as directly accessible to
the literary influences of the time as it had ever been. If Diderot had
inquired into the vernacular productions of the country, he would have
found that here also the wave of reaction against French conventions,
the tide of English simplicity and domestic sentimentalism, had passed
into literature. The _Spectator_ and _Clarissa Harlowe_ inspired the
writers of Holland, as they had inspired Diderot himself.[92]

[91] George Forster's _Ansichten vom Niederrhein_, etc. ii. 396
(1790).

[92] Jonckbloet's _Gesch. d. Niederland. Lit._ (German trans.) ii.
502, etc.

In erudition, it was still what, even after the death of Scaliger, it
had remained through the seventeenth century, the most learned state of
Europe; and the elder Hemsterhuys, with such pupils as Ruhnken and
Valckenaer, kept up as well as he could