Page images
PDF
EPUB

language, when he could obtain, by a smattering of it and a knowledge of writing, twice or thrice as much as a mere copyist or book-keeper. The advance from sixteen shillings to sixty appears great, but is not equivalent to the increased amount of learning required. By the second it is hardly too much to say that some knowledge of the whole of English literature is embraced,-prose, poetry, composition, history, mathematics to a large extent, and in natural philosophy a range which is enough to appal the student. All this is to be acquired in a foreign language, with no help of any kind. If a high standard of examination is required, the encouragement ought to be proportionate.

It is melancholy to see this exhibition of poverty on the part of the Government of Bengal, and of the niggardly spirit in which the wants of the people are supplied. £24,000 a-year was given years ago to prop up Arabic and Sanscrit, by paying people to learn them. Is nothing to be given for the use of English and the languages of the people? Will the Directors shut their eyes and ears to the necessities of the people of India in this vital respect? When disaffection is feared, will they longer delay the institution of a system of national education on a broad basis, which, more than a thousand enactments, would attach the people to them by the bond of a common union? Seek to raise them to a high standard, and they will rise from their own grovelling faith, their ignorance, to our light. Our own standards of acquirement show that we believe them capable of this: they want only encouragement, assistance, and by God's blessing those who are now in power may live to rejoice that they were instrumental in that good work, which would raise a practically ignorant people to knowledge, an utterly blinded and priest-ridden people to a participation in a pure faith and its glorious hopes.

179

ARTICLE VI.

1. History of Holland from the beginning of the Tenth to the end of the Eighteenth Century. By C. M. Davies. 1841-44. 3 vols. 8vo. London: Parker.

2. Histoire des Pays-Bas depuis les tems anciens jusqu'à la création du royaume des Pays-Bas en 1815. Par l'Abbé J. H. JANSSENS. 3 vols. 8vo. Bruxelles, 1840.

3. Histoire de la Flandre et de ses Institutions civiles et politiques jusqu'à l'année 1305. Par L. A. WARNKŒNIG. Truduite de l'Allemand, avec corrections et additions de l'auteur, par A. E. GHELDOLF. 2 vols. 8vo. Bruxelles,

1836.

If we adopt the common notions of a Dutchman or Fleming, we must describe a variety of the human race whose nether integuments are out of all proportion to the upper, whose tastes are for tulips, schnaps and pictures of good cheer, and whose ideal of life is retirement in a painted country-house, in a trim garden guarded by a wooden sentry, and overlooking a wide prospect of meadows, windmills, poplars and water. And with mar.y people this would pass for a correct portraiture. We may therefore be suspected of paradox if we affirm that no portion of European history, ancient or modern, affords purer examples of national and personal heroism than that of Holland; that none will better repay the study of the jurist, the antiquary, or the economist; and that the records of Antwerp, Ghent and Leyden are quite as interesting and even more instructive than those of Genoa, Florence and Pisa.

At a time therefore when the histories of France, Italy and Germany have been presented to us in their most attractive forms by such writers as Guizot, Sismondi, Michelet and Ranke, we are glad to welcome any work that may help to revive our interest in the history of Holland and the Netherlands. Nor is our welcome less cordial because the task has been undertaken by a lady, who, as might be supposed, has rather trodden in the footsteps of others than explored herself the almost interminable maze of Dutch charters

and chronicles. In three stout and readable octavo volumes Mrs. Davies has given us the substance of the histories of Bor, Meteren, Brandt, Hooft, Wagenaar, and others,— many of them classical compositions, but in an idiom little known. She has availed herself with great industry of such contemporary memoirs as throw light upon her principal authorities, and, although relying rather too much upon Dutch sources alone, and too minute in her accounts of battles and sieges, has conceived and compiled her narrative in a good spirit. Until supplanted by more original and independent researches, Mrs. Davies' volumes may be safely followed as a useful text-book for present knowledge and a serviceable clue to future inquiries.

The work of the Abbé Janssens is more comprehensive, since it includes the history of the Netherlands as well as of Holland; but their records are in the more important periods so intimately connected, that Mrs. Davies' volumes include nearly as much Flemish as Dutch history. Janssens' work is however much the more complete in those sections which relate to the local and federal constitution of the several states. Yet, strictly speaking, it is less a history than a very full and careful summary of Dutch and Flemish annals: and the abrupt brevity of the paragraphs and minute division of the chapters give it the air of a manual for lectures rather than of what its title professes-a' Histoire des Pays-Bas.' The good Abbé is sometimes sorely perplexed between his liking for monarchy and stubborn facts, between his convictions that Barneveldt and De Witt were in the right, and his bias to the ascendency of the House of Orange. His work however is more original than that of Mrs. Davies, and is an excellent companion and supplement to it. Mr. Warnkoenig's 'Histoire de la Flandre,' of which we have seen only the French translation, is a much more profound and critical production than either the History of Holland' or the 'Histoire des PaysBas'; but it deals rather with the foundations of the history than with the history itself. Both in French and in English indeed a history of Holland remains to be written.

We shall therefore avail ourselves of the works enumerated at the head of this article as text-books only for exhibiting the characteristics and capacities of the subject; not indeed

attempting to show how a history of Holland should be written, nor why out of Holland itself it is still a desideratum, but, from certain salient points and sections of Dutch and Flemish annals, alleging reasons wherefore it is worth writing. Our extracts, as in duty bound to our industrious countrywoman, will be taken from Mrs. Davies' pages, but we shall lay the Abbé Janssens' under liberal contribution for the purposes of correction, amplification or disquisition.

The history of commercial states is generally veiled in obscurity. The peaceful routine of municipal institutions and industrious enterprize cannot compete in interest with the moving accidents of war and conquest. But for its collision with Rome, Carthage would be as little known to us as its metropolis Tyre, and the three Punic wars are almost the only record of a republic whose trade, institutions and social development must have presented some of the most instructive and interesting phænomena of antiquity. In one circumstance especially our comparative ignorance of Holland and the Flemish provinces, wherever their history is not inseparably mixed up with that of France or England or Spain, proceeds from a similar cause to that of the indifference of Greek and Roman writers to the polity and chronicles of Carthage. The Punic language, though more extensively spoken along the shores of the Mediterranean than the Low Dutch or Flemish idioms in Northern Europe, was always an alien dialect to Athens and Rome; and the speech of Antwerp or Amsterdam has never been employed in European diplomacy and literature. To this isolation of their mother-tongue the Dutch people have themselves directly contributed. Although singularly fertile in vernacular poets and historians, and retaining some of the purest elements of the Teutonic race of languages, their most distinguished writers have preferred the Latin or French idioms. They have even hidden their patronymics and baptismal names under strange enigmas. The parents of Erasmus christened him Gherard Gherardts. Jan Van Gorp, who wrote a book to prove that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in Paradise, shrank from his paradisiacal appellation, and signed himself Toropius Becanus, and Ian Oudewater baffles the heralds' college under the sonorous title of Johannes Palæonydorus. But a people that forgoes its mother-tongue

forgoes its birthright, and must endure obscurity if not obli vion. In defence of the Dutch however it may be alleged that their language, though rich in its vocabulary, is singularly harsh and uncouth in prosody and enunciation. We are all more or less under the influence of association: the parties of the Neri and Bianchi, of the Montecchi and Capelletti, are hallowed by poetry and recommended by euphony; but the Dutch are very unlucky in their party designations. Their towns in the fourteenth century were divided between the Hook and Cod factions; and in the fifteenth they were waging the Bread-and-Cheese (Casembrotspel) war. It has ever been the tendency of Northern Europe to copy the arts and literature of the south, and neither the language, the geographical position, nor the continental influence of Holland have been favourable to its historical reputation.

The history of Holland alone indeed, were an example wanting, would confirm the truth of Sallust's remark, that states owe their name with posterity as much to the great writers they have produced as to the great deeds which they have done. Predilections, so early implanted by education as to be almost innate, attract us to the communities in which European civilization was originally developed, and where, after centuries of decline and dissolution, it again first revived. Hence while the Greck and Italian republics fill a prominent place in the annals of Europe, the history of the United Provinces and the Netherlands is comparatively unknown. While however we duly pay our debt of reverence to the birth-places of freedom and science, we are more tardily and meanly just to the Teutonic parents of our civilization. Our speech has been enriched, our social life refined, and our perception of the beautiful quickened by the ancient and modern genius of Southern Europe; but the institutions in which we surpass "insolent Greece and haughty Rome" were nurtured and fashioned among the rivers and forests of the North by races nearest akin to ourselves. And were these considerations insufficient to awaken in us a near interest in the annals of a kindred people, their connexion with our own history would establish an immediate claim upon our sympathics. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Holland-its institutions, its sufferings and its struggles-were the cynosure of all

« PreviousContinue »