"In a very strict sense Doctor van Noppen's first lecture was scholarly and showed clearly that it breathes a university atmosphere and is intended primarily and ultimately for the lecture hall of the Johns Hopkins University, where he is soon to deliver the series. He is just now returning from a lecture tour in the West.
"Beginning with a clever characterization of the people of Holland as a practical one, first reclaiming from the sea a land to live on, and then anchoring it to the continent, in rapid review he showed what a wonderful contribution this little country, less than Maryland, and small in everything but in history, has made to modern Christian civilization. Washed out of the soil of Germany on toward the sea--and no wonder that Germany looks with envious eyes upon it--it is the richest country imaginable. It has a per capita wealth of $12,000 as against America's $4,000. In proportion to population it has done more for civilization than any other nation, not even Greece excepted. Then followed in rapid review the facts of history in substantiation of the claim.
"Conspicuous in the claims and seemingly substantiated was in the influence of Holland in spreading abroad, notably in America, the doctrines of the equality of all men, separation of Church and State, religious freedom, freedom of the press, local self-government.
"Fine was the description of Philip of Spain, of William the Silent. Interesting was the portrayal of the work of the Chamber of Eglantine of Amsterdam, of the men of letters of Leiden and the intellectual forces leading up to and resulting in the great University in Leiden.
"Most striking of all was his brilliant description of the life and work of the great Dutch poet Vondel and the story of how Milton, the greatest of English Epic poets, has been content to follow, imitate and copy from Vondel in his Lucifer where Vondel has shown himself the great dramatist."
The "Baltimore Sun" writes of his lecture at Johns Hopkins:
"Very frequently since the day when Geoffrey Chaucer fashioned his immortal 'Canterbury Tales' upon Bocaccio's 'Decameron,' English poets have been subject to the impeachment of having borrowed (usually without proper acknowledgment) from foreign sources--borrowed material, plot, episodes, characters and, sometimes, language, embodied in whole phrases and sentences. The Elizabethan Age, pre-eminent though it was in creative literary excellence, has not escaped the challenge of its originality. French and Italian influences and writers exercised a strongly formative power upon Drayton, Sidney, Spenser and others of the elect, and even the great Bard of Stratford did not scruple at transmuting the clay of less gifted molders into the gold of his superb coinage.