Chapter V

The Hague

Dutch precision--Shaping hands--Nature under control--Willow
_v_. Neptune--The lost star--S'Gravenhage--The
Mauritshuis--Rembrandt--The "School of Anatomy"--Jan
Vermeer of Delft--The frontispiece--Other pictures--The
Municipal Museum--Baron Steengracht's collection--The Mesdag
treasures--French romantics at The Hague--The Binnenhof--John
van Olden Barneveldt--Man's cruelty to man--The churches--The
fish market and first taste of Scheveningen--A crowded
street--Holland's reading--The Bosch--The club--The House
in the Wood--Mr. "Secretary" Prior--Old marvels--Howell the
receptive and Coryate the credulous.

Although often akin to the English, the Dutch character differs from it
very noticeably in the matter of precision. The Englishman has little
precision; the Dutchman has too much. He bends everything to it. He has
at its dictates divided his whole country into parellelograms. Even the
rushes in his swamps are governed by the same law. The carelessness
of nature is offensive to him; he moulds and trains on every hand,
as one may see on the railway journey to The Hague. Trees he endures
only so long as they are obedient and equidistant: he likes them
in avenues or straight lines; if they grow otherwise they must be
pollarded. It is true that he has not touched the Bosch, at The Hague;
but since his hands perforce have been kept off its trees, he has run
scores of formal straight well-gravelled paths beneath their branches.