It was
not until he reached Holland that those adorable Irish brains of
his realised that he who teaches English to a Dutchman must first
know Dutch.
Goldsmith, who spent his life in doing characteristic things--few
men have done more--when once he had determined to go to Holland,
took a passage in a vessel bound for Bordeaux. At Newcastle-on-Tyne,
however, on going ashore to be merry, he was arrested as a Jacobite
and thrown into prison for a fortnight. The result was that the ship
sailed without him. It was just as well for him and for us, for it
sank at the mouth of the Garonne. In 1755, however, he was in Leyden,
although by what route, circuitous or direct, he reached that city
we do not know.
He lost little time in giving his Uncle Contarine an account of his
impressions of Holland and its people. Here is a portion of a long
letter: "The modern Dutchman is quite a different creature from
him of former times: he in everything imitates a Frenchman, but
in his easy disengaged air, which is the result of keeping polite
company. The Dutchman is vastly ceremonious, and is perhaps exactly
what a Frenchman might have been in the reign of Louis XIV. Such are
the better bred. But the downright Hollander is one of the oddest
figures in nature: upon a head of lank hair he wears a half-cocked
narrow hat laced with black ribbon; no coat, but seven waistcoats,
and nine pairs of breeches; so that his hips reach almost up to his
arm-pits.
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