and weak betimes. He and his school tend (as some one has well said)
to make humility and humiliation change places." Finally, of the Bible:
"The three best translations of the Bible, in my opinion, are, in order
of merit, the English, the Dutch, and Diodati's Italian version. As
to Luther, he is admirable in rendering the prophets. He says either
just what the prophets _did say_, or that which you see at once they
_might have said_."

Leyden has two vast churches, St. Peter's and St. Pancras's. Both
are immense and unadorned, I think that St. Pancras's is the lightest
church I was ever in. St. Peter's ought to be filled with memorials of
the town's illustrious sons, but it has few. As I have said elsewhere,
I asked in vain for the grave of Jan Steen, who was buried here.

It was at Leyden that I saw my first Kermis, or fair, seven years ago,
and ate my first poffertjes and wafelen. Writing as a foreigner, in no
way concerned with the matter, I may express regret that the Kermis
is not what it was in Holland. Possibly were one living in Holland,
one would at once join the anti-Kermis party; but I hope not. In
Amsterdam the anti-Kermis party has succeeded, and though one may
still in that city at certain seasons eat wafelen and poffertjes,
the old glories have departed, just as they have departed from so
many English towns which once broke loose for a few nights every
year. Even Barnet Fair is not what it was.

Noise seems to be the principal objection. Personally, I never saw
any drunkenness; and there is so little real revelry that one turns
one's back on the naphtha lamps in this town and that, in Leyden and
the Hoorn, Apeldoorn and Middelburg, with the sad conviction that the
times are out of joint, and that Teniers and Ostade and Brouwer, were