borderlands, remained united under a single bishop: the bishop of
Utrecht. The meshes of ecclesiastical organization were wider here than
elsewhere. They had no university. Paris remained, even after the
designing policy of the Burgundian dukes had founded the university of
Louvain in 1425, the centre of doctrine and science for the northern
Netherlands. From the point of view of the wealthy towns of Flanders and
Brabant, now the heart of the Burgundian possessions, Holland and
Zealand formed a wretched little country of boatmen and peasants.
Chivalry, which the dukes of Burgundy attempted to invest with new
splendour, had but moderately thrived among the nobles of Holland. The
Dutch had not enriched courtly literature, in which Flanders and Brabant
zealously strove to follow the French example, by any contribution worth
mentioning.

Whatever was coming up in Holland flowered unseen; it was not of a sort
to attract the attention of Christendom. It was a brisk navigation and
trade, mostly transit trade, by which the Hollanders already began to
emulate the German Hansa, and which brought them into continual contact
with France and Spain, England and Scotland, Scandinavia, North Germany
and the Rhine from Cologne upward. It was herring fishery, a humble
trade, but the source of great prosperity--a rising industry, shared by
a number of small towns.

Not one of those towns in Holland and Zealand, neither Dordrecht nor
Leyden, Haarlem, Middelburg, Amsterdam, could compare with Ghent,
Bruges, Lille, Antwerp or Brussels in the south. It is true that in the
towns of Holland also the highest products of the human mind germinated,
but those towns themselves were still too small and too poor to be
centres of art and science. The most eminent men were irresistibly drawn
to one of the great foci of secular and ecclesiastical culture. Sluter,
the great sculptor, went to Burgundy, took service with the dukes, and
bequeathed no specimen of his art to the land of his birth. Dirk Bouts,
the artist of Haarlem, removed to Louvain, where his best work is
preserved; what was left at Haarlem has perished. At Haarlem, too, and
earlier, perhaps, than anywhere else, obscure experiments were being
made in that great art, craving to be brought forth, which was to change
the world: the art of printing.

There was yet another characteristic spiritual phenomenon, which
originated here and gave its peculiar stamp to life in these countries.
It wa