Mr. Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all he touches, has
described in his _Side-Walk Studies_ the huge, illustrated edition
of Cats' Works (Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly
constituted old-fashioned Dutch households. I have seen it at the
British Museum, and it seems to me to be one of the best picture-books
in the world.
As Mr. Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced in it. "What
would one not give for such an illustrated copy of Shakespeare! In
these pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of the
seventeenth century:--its vanes and spires and steep-roofed houses;
its gardens with their geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped
alleys and arches, their shining parallelograms of water. Here are
its old-fashioned interiors, with the deep fire-places and queer
andirons, the huge four-posters, the prim portraits on the wall, the
great brass-clamped coffers and carved _armories_ for the ruffs and
starched collars and stiff farthingales of the women. In one picture
you may see the careful housewife mournfully inspecting a moth-eaten
garment which she has just taken from a chest that Wardour Street
might envy; in another she is energetically cuffing the 'foolish
fat scullion,' who has let the spotted Dalmatian coach-dog overturn
the cauldron at the fire.
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