[ 434 ] [OCT. 



THE NETHERLANDS.* 



WE are no great admirers of the abridgments which have lately 

 become so common, and which, in nine instances out of ten, are but 

 contrivances for preserving the husks of literature, while they reject 

 all its substance and soundness. But there are topics which fairly allow 

 of being thrown into this shape ; and histories of Holland and Belgium 

 are among the fittest for the operation. The historians of the Nether- 

 lands have hitherto made their subject unpopular, and, in consequence, 

 useless, by their enormity of amplification. The exploits of every 

 burgher, the finance of every village, and the quarrels, compacts, 

 riots, and regulations of every town, have found a historian to send 

 them down not to fame, but to oblivion not to give their example 

 for the benefit of mankind, but to teach all mankind the peril of 

 touching a Belgian volume, and the misery of being buried, alive or 

 dead, by the ponderous sepulture of a Flemish historian. 



Mr. Grattan's work, allowing for a few obvious faults in arrangement, 

 and a little too sudden an admiration of the powers that be a fault, 

 considerably the reverse of what we had expected from his previous 

 style of opinions is a very clever condensation, written with good 

 sense, knowledge, and spirit, and will answer all the purposes of the 

 general reader, who wishes to know as much about the Netherlands as 

 is worth knowing. 



But as we are Utilitarians in those matters, and value a book only for 

 its use to the present time, we shall leave the early stories of this 

 amphibious people to the curious in icthyology. Let who will tell for 

 us at what time a Dutchman ceased to be a fish, and emerged from the 

 ooze of the Zuydersee to the ooze of Brabant ; when he deposited his 

 fins and took to his feet ; and when, rising from his secondary state of 

 merman-ism, and feeding upon sea- weed and bulrushes, he perpendicu- 

 larized himself into man, lived upon his kindred herrings, and invented 

 sour krout. We leave his Brabant exploits to the novelists, in the full 

 assurance that Mrs. Bray and the Count de Barante will deliver them 

 down with due honour to the generations to come. Our purpose is to 

 tell in what condition the Netherlands now are, by whom brought into 

 that condition, and how England may be the better or the worse for them. 



For all the purposes of stirring the world, there are two nations, and 

 but two England and France : England, for the outlying kingdoms, 

 for the islands, the colonies, the whole loose and diversified circle of 

 power touched by the ocean ; France, for the Continent. Every change 

 that has been wrought in the frame of Europe for the last five centuries 

 has, in some way, direct or indirect, been the work of France ; and 

 what has been, is as likely to be in the present hour of agitation, as in 

 any hour since a Henry the Fourth, or a Louis the Fourteenth, sat upon 

 the throne of that ambitious, volatile, and mighty nation. 



The philosophers of France, such as they were a herd of impudent 

 pretenders to all knowledge, and, among the rest, to the knowledge of 

 governing had made a convert of Joseph the Second ,* a cold enthu- 

 siast, frigid in theory, violent in practice, proclaiming his love for free 

 choice in every man, and exhibiting his love by fresh impositions, sullen 



* The History of the Netherlands, by Thomas Colley Grattan. (Cabinet Cyclopedia.) 



