LEYDEN'S UNIVERSITY, HAARLEM'S FLOWERS, AND AMSTERDAM'S COMMERCE.
We gave only one day to Leyden, ten miles from The Hague, but it was one of the most interesting days we have had in Europe. Taking a guide at the railway station, we traversed the quaint streets and crossed and recrossed the multitudinous canals, and climbed to the top of the great fortified circular mound of earth in the centre of the city, called the _Burg_, the foundations of which date from the tenth century, and from the top of which we had a unique view of the heroic old town and the peaceful homes of its fifty-four thousand people.
But one does not go far in Leyden without being reminded of the terrible siege to which it was subjected by the Spaniards in 1574. One such reminder is the bronze statue of the gallant Mayor Van der Werf, who defended the city in that siege and would listen to no suggestion of surrender. Another is an inscription on the front of the Stadhuis, which, translated, reads: "When the black famine had brought to the death nearly six thousand persons, then God the Lord repented and gave us bread again as much as we could wish"; and which in the original Dutch is an ingenious chronogram, the capital letters as Roman numerals giving the date, and the one hundred and thirty-one letters used in the original indicating the number of days during which the siege lasted. But, after a short and partial relief, the siege was continued in the form of a blockade for many dreadful months. William of Orange finally cut the dykes and flooded the country, and relieved the famished city by ships.
The story of Leyden which made the deepest impression upon me as a boy was that of William's offering to reward the citizens for this gallant defence either by exempting them from taxes for a certain number of years or by the establishment of a university in their city. To their everlasting honor they chose the latter, even in that time of distress and poverty, and the University was founded in 1575. Of course we wished to see the University which had such a history as that, to say nothing of the fact that we had heard of Leyden jars ever since we began the study of electricity at college, and that we knew something of a few of the men whose genius has at different periods since made the faculty one of the most illustrious in Europe, such as "the learned Scaliger," the famous physician Boerhaave, Arminius and Gomar, champions, respectively, of the two theological schools known as Arminians or Remonstrants and Calvinists, which in 1618 brought their differences to debate in the famous Synod of Dort; and, as is always the case when an opportunity for thorough discussion on the basis of Scripture is given, the result was a victory for the Calvinists. We remembered also with pleasure that Oliver Goldsmith, author of the immortal _Vicar of Wakefield_, was for a time a student at the University of Leyden; and we recalled with less pleasure that in our own day the faculty of the institution had furnished one of the boldest advocates of the destructive criticism of the Old Testament, Professor Abraham Kuenen.