THE GLASSES OF GOUDA.

BY H. F. CHORLEY.

By which way those to whom holiday means no post, no newspapers, nor imps crying for "copy" as vigorously as the Horse-leech his sons, should run out of England,-whither ward to escape in search of peace, quietness, and such fresh impressions as are absolutely necessary to the over-wrought Londoner, was not the easiest thing in the world to decide this autumn of 1848. Yet there was small choice. If a distant flight was to be taken, it must be to Spain, Greece, or Norway; if a home tour, to Holland.

In the latter land the pretensions of neither Louis Blanc nor Louis Napoleon trouble the Israel of Mynheer. They are dyked out. will have none of their teachings or ideas. I had found the country charming a couple of years since-curious in its works of art-interesting in the moral and material courage and resolution, which its entire prosperity (nay, even preservation) reveal; toothsome (don't be shocked, transcendental reader) in its water-sootje, its rusks, and its curaçoa. Only I could not make myself like the climate. I hate the Cockney word "muggy;" yet nothing else will do for the temperature of Holland. Hot and steaming; cold and aguish: such is the pilgrim's bill of fare. D (who always lays everything upon misgovernment) maintains that this state of atmosphere is kept up by the Schiedam manufacturers and those who sell kanaster. I am not sure but that there may not be some truth in his notion. One leans indulgently towards a yard of clay, and lovingly in the direction of a gin-bottle, ere one has been in Holland many mornings and evenings.

The best way to go into Holland is, assuredly, from Belgium by water. Leave Antwerp by the "Amicitia" steamer, submit to the normally civil search of the custom-house officers at Fort Batz,—and be set down on the pier at Bergen-op-Zoom,-ye who have a fancy to do what is characteristic!-this, with one proviso,—if the weather be fine. For the pier at Bergen-op-Zoom is three-quarters of a mile out of the town, situate (as old geographers say) on the edge of a dyke and beneath the walls of the fortress. Our disembarkation was complicated by the departure of certain military heroes, who, attended by their female friends, crowded the little jetty. But in this matter the Hollanders don't seem to mind inconvenience, if one is to judge from a quaint picture by Ruisdael in the gallery at the Hague, in which sundry authentic personages with their ladies are represented as absolutely wading through the surf on the shallow shore to reach the packet-boat, which will push off so soon as the tide rises one more inch!-Our luggage was stuffed into a boat, to be rowed up into the town,-ourselves preferring to walk; and thus we came in for an exquisite piece of Dutch sentiment. On the pier was an old man fishing for crabs; picking out the largest from the teeming baskets which he hauled up, securing them in a net, and allowing the rest to crawl back by hundreds to their native element. Up the pier came slowly a tender She,-tearful after parting with her Major Sturgeon, one was to judge by the laced handkerchief to her eyes. But few griefs will resist a little timely diversion. I used

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to take infinite pleasure in the Princess of Amboyna in the Eastern piece, whose lover was carried away at the instance of the cruel tyrant to feed the Imperial Bengal Tiger-when she was bidden by her confidante to compose herself, put up her hair, dry her eyes, and come to see the Royal Elephant eat his supper,"-the suivante snugly adding, "Try, madam,-'twill do you good,-it is a most wonderful animal," and there and then launching out into rich quotations from Goldsmith and "the posters." But here was a reality little less whimsical. The forsaken lady of Bergen-op-Zoom was arrested by the crabgathering: stopped as she passed the fisherman -considered his spoil-poked with her parasol the small "specimens" not worthy of being brought to market which were sideling hither and thither-smiled-thought of her widowed soup-kettle or stewpan-and was comforted, after the famous receipt of Mr. Robert Fudge.

If I am dallying on Bergen jetty, when my point was a very much further one, forgive me for the sake of the moving picture I have set before you. Further would you know how from Bergen-op-Zoom we posted in the roomiest of post-waggons to Breda,-what manner of excellent inn we found there, and how rare are the curiosities in the Great Church,-how, on the following day, we posted through Ter Heide to Moerdijk,-crossed by steam to Willemsdorp,- walked thence to bright, quaint, glowing, busy Dordrecht,—and were there picked up by steamer for Rotterdam,-I am willing to narrate the above, dear, patient reader, for "a consideration,"-two better days of entertainment not being in my record. Enough, however, has been sung to symphonise the main subject of my present ditty.

Unless you be a pupil of Mr. Willement, it is more than probable that you may have never heard of the "glasses" of Gouda, otherwise the Krabeth-and windows in the Great Church there. We had, though merely paper-stainers, settled to make a pilgrimage to the same from Rotterdam. This steam hath now rendered the easiest thing in life, and one of the pleasantest - fine weather granted. Crossing the ferry at the end of the Boompjes, we were, directly in the midst of the "short steamers," as the boats going to Geertruidenberg, Gorinchem, and Gouda may be called. We can shew busier scenes on our own Thames and Mersey, but there are few so busy out of England. M-, who does the engineering of our expedition, denounces these lagoon craft (for the Maas, the Waal, the Lek, and the Yssel are here hardly rivers) as clumsy. They are very slow-ours required two and a half hours to puff up the water to Gouda. But the voyage had its varieties. On board we had a very sociable-which means a rather impudent-Jew tailor, who was resolved to fit me out from his boxes; disparaged my coat, and tendered me a better one at a fabulous price, made all the more fabulous by his affectionately particular desire to sell to me. No coat?-no paletot?-no waistcoat?-no ahems?-Nothing wanted? Then, perhaps, Mynheer would buy a watch?" And out came a silver turnip, very little more civilized than the "hour-eggs" which hang up within the Frankfort gate of Nuremberg, in the little uhr-macher's booth there. Except M. Monte's importunity, there was little to notice among our fellow-passengers. But on either bank what pictures! "Dutch pictures!" cries my friend the Sentimentalist, with a sneer intended to be withering. Well, and why not a poetry in Dutch landscape? In the first place, it is remarkable for a clearness, a

lucid light of atmosphere totally distinct from harshness, such as is to be seen nowhere else, save, perhaps, in the Rhine Land. Then it is made up of ingredients not one of which is intrinsically ugly. Tame it can hardly be called when the colour is so brilliant; while as to its appeals to thought, reason, and feeling. . . . if the mountain heights (as William Howitt has beautifully called them, the strongholds of freedom) are noble,-is there nothing glorious in a kingdom won from the rapacious Sea, which he laps, and licks, and bites, and undermines, and yet cannot master, because MAN has vowed to his household gods that the foe shall not devour them? On our water-way to Gouda we had every combination of windmill, farmhouse, flower-garden, reed-stack, single tree and avenue, spire, and boats, picturesque in form and freightage, gliding up and down, and across and aslant the landscape. Boats behind an orchard,—the smell of tar in the midst of Keetje's milch-kine,-for lane a creek-for hedge a bed of plumy reeds, each eight or ten feet high, affording, when swayed by the wind, an exquisite play of light, colour, and sound, to say nothing of the quaint fantasy of a great and powerful land guarded from the Spoiler by barricades of feathers!—I tell you, brother pilgrim, who take up the cuckoo-cry of abuse against Dutch landscape, for the sake of Switzerland, or the Italian lakes, (God bless them! and send them a settled government!) or the grand valleys of the Tyrol, or the Rhine rocks, or the Danube uplands,-that you have not enjoyed any one of these to the full-that is, with a painter's eye. You would otherwise also enjoy, as we did, our two hours of winding and twining up the Yssel. "It is the soul that sees," said Crabbe, and the same that under-measures the pleasures of the plains, will also stint of its due dignity the glory of the mountains.

At last, after passing a particularly long row of trees, the steamer came to a full stop by the pier at Gouda: and we went on shore and made our way along the canal side, in the direction of the great tower which announced itself. The provincial Dutch are rather given to staring at strangers, I must say; a body-guard of half a dozen children being a pretty fair allowance to each passenger. Here, in addition, we were favoured by the attention of a friend in a blue coat, with a brass medal for decoration, and cane vice constable's staff, neither quite so mysterious nor familiar as the government attendant whom the chef de la police allotted to me at Vienna four years ago;—but reasonably well got up for Gouda. We were in the midst of a brave debate about the angle to which certain tumbling houses were out of the perpendicular, when up stepped Mynheer Blue Coat and Brass Medal, and demanded our passports. They were left at Rotterdam. "Had we no carte de sureté, then?" Not even this could be mustered. We had merely come out for a morning to see the windows. "Then we must follow him there and then to the Police office ;" and, not listening to yea or nay, the functionary whom our want of a proper seriousness under suspicion somewhat exasperated, would have us with him to the Hotel de Ville; the afore-mentioned small children of Gouda looking fearfully on. The example, it is to be hoped, will sink deep into their minds.

I confess (much misliking the mood of the British Lion, when thus enforced he becomes the British Turkey-cock) that my reverence is on these occasions very apt to fail me ;-never having been

properly able to associate the idea of justice with such rubbishy transactions. Shall I ever forget the Dogberina of Angera on Lago Maggiore, to whom (her Dogberry being absent) we furnished an agreeable entertainment on a hot morning in consequence of being cited by certain frantic and extortionate boatmen ; and how she smiled away the complaint?-Shall I ever forget the irate English painter, brought up before my friend admirable Burgomaster Wappener of the Nassauer Hof at St. Goarshausen on the Rhine, for the unlicensed eating of grapes in a vineyard on a Sunday morning, and amerced to the awful sum of one shilling and three pence?-But to be taken up as a rambling Louis Blanc or Caussidière, was a better adventure with a vengeance, if one could have bent one's mind to it.

Now, the Hotel de Ville at Gouda,-in spite of its having served as residence for Jacqueline of Bavaria during the wars betwixt Hoek and Kabiljauw,-looks in no respect more dignified than one of those alabaster churches with coloured glass windows and a lamp within, which meet the Londoner by the trayfull on autumn evenings, when other shows languish. But had it been as grim as the Rath-Haus at Ratisbon, there was no getting up a sensation, so far as we were concerned. Two words from us to the very civil chef, and about three from him (mostly ending in eek), to the officious commissaire, and that official was dismissed to tell the small children of Gouda, how he had been snubbed, and the lawless English travellers were set at liberty to enjoy and amuse themselves as they listed.

The Great Church is about half a hundred steps distant from the Hotel de Ville. The doors were invitingly open-organ playing was going on. Be the building ever so mean, the instrument ever so bad, and the player ever so trumpery, the sound of organ-playing surging out from the doors of a church, is about one of the best things to be enjoyed by any man having an ear. A vagueness, a pomp, a mixture of associations belong to it, such, I think, as are commanded by no other music. And at Gouda the organ is excellent, possessing a particularly potent and expressive vox humana stop. The church, too, is noble in its proportions (the Gothic of these churches in Holland is of a very good period), though spoiled by that plaster-work of whitewash with which it is here the fashion to overlay every sacred building. Sometimes, however, a combination accidentally gets made by ignorance, chance, or even parsimony, which produces a capital result; and such is the case at Gouda. The wooden roof has been painted a heavy olive-green; and, ugly as this sounds, taken in combination with the vistas of white columns, and the gorgeous tapestry-like effect of the one and thirty painted windows of side aisle, transept, and choir, the picturesque effect of the entire interior could hardly be mended, were Mr. Pugin to come, with his scraper and pattern book in hand, on the work of restoration intent.

The "glasses" at Gouda have the advantage of another accompaniment, as precious, after its kind, as the rich and agreeable tones of the organ. Not only is the cicerone a talking specimen of that marvellous language got up for the stranger's use, which is nowhere to be found so rich, grave, and civil, as in Holland; but he has to sell a book in English, printed at Gouda towards the end of the seventeenth century, worth its weight in gold. This is an EXPLANATION of the famous and renowned GLASS-WORK on painted windows in the fine and eminent church at GoUDA. For the use

and commodity of both Inhabitants and Foreigners that come to see this artificial Work." And the book contains descriptions, mottos, appropriate sentiments, written in a delicious old-fashioned, serious, moralizing strain, by some foreigner who piqued himself on " spiking" English; which, taken in conjunction with a pretty rich crop of press-errors, makes up about as whimsical a vade mecum as those who cultivate malapropriety could desire.

The Church of John the Baptist at Gouda, burnt down by lightning in 1552, and the rubbish having been carried away "by the inhabitants of the city by turns, voluntarily and merrily, the people going to work at the sound of pipes and drums "-"another church was raised, as a Phoenix from the ashes, but far more glorious and magnificent than the former, so that because of the excellent glasswork this building is renowned all over the world."

I am not going to make the Reader go the round of the one and thirty "Glassen," beginning with the first "next to thee steeple door at the north side," though the descriptions and glosses have that pleasing and profitable quaintness, which I am sure that he (being somewhat of a humorist I doubt not) would enjoy heartily. How one was given by "the Noble Prince Ericus, Duck of Brunswick ;" another by "Philip King of Spain, Engeland, and France, and both the Siciles;" others by the "Lords Burghermasters of Amsterdam, Rotterdam," &c., is all methodically set down in the dear vade mecum, with legends, and moral sayings interspersed. But some among the former may never have reached Lord Lindsay or Mrs. Jameson :—at all events, I am sure that neither of those eloquent or earnest writers could narrate in so charming a style the subjoined legend of

Saint Benedictus.

narrated apropos of the "Glas" given by

The Reverend Lord Cornelis van Myerop, Provost and ArchDeacon at Utrecht, and Canon of St. Saviour's Church at Utrecht, 1556.

"His portrait," saith the little book, "stands underneath, and before him Mary with Jesus in her lap, a serpent under her seet, and behind him a great sire (fire), with the image of Saint Benedictus, having in his hand a stick, with a black raven on it; it being on record and reported that a raven came every day to the said Saint to get his sood, and also that one Florentius, who could not bear the virtue of Saint Benedictus, sought to kill him by a poysonous loaf, which he sent him as a charity. But this holy man commanded the raven to carry the loaf where nobody should be able to find it; which being done by the raven, he returned to fetch his usual food. "The fire had this signification: Saint Benedictus saw a temple, wherein on the altar stood a devil, in the shape of the false god, Apollo, to whom divine honour was paid. But this so troubled the holy man that he broke the idol, threw down the altar, and set the temple on fire. The devil, incensed because of this, appeared in a most terrible shape, casting forth fiery flames from his mouth, eyes, and ears."

Thus charmingly is the "glass-lover" led on from window to window nor was ever quaint device of language more deservedly lavished upon any object of art than upon these "matchless pieces." The designs, of which carefully-executed cartoons are displayed in