picture."--"They are seldom deceived, for they will trust nobody. They
may always deceive, for you must trust them, as for instance, if you
travel, to ask a bill of Particulars is to purre in a wasp's nest,
you must pay what they ask as sure as if it were the assessment of
a Subsidy."

But the wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen
Feltham, from whom I quote later. His little book on the Low Countries
is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope: the first half
of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic. It is
he who charges the Dutch convivial spirits with drinking down the
Evening Starre and drinking up the Morning Starre.

The old literature tells us also that the Dutch were not
always clean. Indeed, their own painters prove this: Ostade
pre-eminently. There are many allusions in Elizabethan and early Stuart
literature to their dirt and rags. In Earle's _Microcosmography_,
for example, a younger brother's last refuge is said to be the Low
Countries, "where rags and linen are no scandal". But better testimony
comes perhaps from _The English Schole-Master_, a seventeenth-century
Dutch-English manual, from which I quote at some length later in this
book. Here is a specimen scrap of dialogue:--


S. May it please you to give me leave to go out?
M. Whither?
S. Home.
M. How is it that you goe so often home?
S. My mother commanded that I and my brother should come to her
this day.