Good Dutchmen when they die go to Scheveningen; but my heaven is
elsewhere. To go thither is, however, no calamity, so long as one
chooses the old road. It is being there that so lowers the spirits. The
Oude Scheveningen Weg is perhaps the pleasantest, and certainly the
shadiest, road in Holland: not one avenue but many, straight as a
line in Euclid. On either side is a spreading wood, among the trees
of which, on the left hand, as one leaves The Hague, is Sorgh Vliet,
once the retreat of old Jacob Cats, lately one of the residences of a
royal Duke, and now sold to a building company. The road dates from
1666, its projector being Constantin Huyghens, poet and statesman,
whose statue may be seen at the half-way halting-place. By the time
this is reached the charm of the road is nearly over: thenceforward
it is all villas and Scheveningen.
But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet (which has the
same meaning as _Sans Souci_), where two hundred years ago lived
in genial retirement the writer who best represents the shrewd
sagacity of the Dutch character--Jacob Cats, or Vader Cats as he was
affectionately called, the author of the Dutch "Household Bible,"
a huge miscellaneous collection of wise saws and modern instances,
humour and satire, upon all the businesses of life.
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