municipal
governments, its reformatories and workhouses, its industry, frugality,
and social economy. The neat buildings, elegant streets, and quiet inns,
were the subject of many encomiums.[288]

Descartes, who chose Amsterdam as the place in which to think out his
philosophy, praised it as the ideal retreat for students, contending
that it was far better for them than Italy, with its plagues, heat,
unwholesome evenings, murder and robbery.[289] Locke, when he went into
voluntary exile in 1684, enjoyed himself with the doctors and men of
letters in Amsterdam, attending by special invitation of the principal
physician of the city the dissection of a lioness, or discussing knotty
problems of theology with the wealthy Quaker merchants.[290] Courtiers
were charmed with the sea-shore at Scheveningen, where on the hard sand,
admirably contrived by nature for the divertisement of persons of
quality, the foreign ambassadors and their ladies, and the society of
the Hague, drove in their coaches and six horses.[291] However, Sir
William Temple, after some years spent as Ambassador to the Netherlands,
decided that Holland was a place where a man would choose rather to
travel than to live, because it was a country where there was more sense
than wit, more wealth than pleasure, and where one would find more
persons to esteem than to love.[292]

Holland was of peculiar delight to the traveller of the seventeenth
century because it contained so many curiosities and rareties. To ferret
out objects of vertu the Jacobean gentleman would take any journey.
People with cabinets of butterflies, miniatures, shells, ivory, or
Indian beads, were pestered by tourists asking to see their
treasures.[293] No garden was so entrancing to them as one that had "a
rupellary nidary"[294] or an aviary with eagles, cranes, storks,
bustards, ducks with four wings, or with rabbits of an almost perfect
yellow colour.[295] Holland, therefore, where ships brought precious
curiosities from all over the world, was a heaven for the virtuoso.
Evelyn in Rotterdam hovered between his delight in the brass statue of
Erasmus and a pelican, which he carefully describes. The great charm of
Dutch inns for Sam Paterson was their hoards of China and Japan ware and
the probability you had of meeting a purring marmot, a squeaking
guinea-pig, or a tame rabbit with a collar of bells, hopping through the
house.[296]

But we have dwelt too long, perhaps, on those who voyaged t