The tram that operates on regular schedule between the Schenkweg in The Hague and the Groote Ryndyk in Leyden pierces a delightful country checkered by a labyrinth of canals, long and short, wide and narrow. Even every patch of humble cabbages appears to be surrounded with one, along which the truck gardeners pole their boats that bear the vegetables direct from soil to market. Tree crested dikes, straight as the shortest distance between two points, stretch away into the perspective in every direction. Villas and cozy country cottages come quickly into view and fade away again behind their groves of trees, giving the traveler just a flitting suggestion of the comfort their owners must find in them. In passing through the neat little brick-paved villages of Voorburg and Voorschoten the tram engine careens around through the streets as if it had developed a first-class state of intoxication. It aims directly for a kitchen door here and the walls of a church there, only to miss them by a few feet while making a dexterous turn to the other side of the road, twisting its diminutive train of two or three cars in its wake. Then out beside the dikes again it puffs and sputters on its seemingly remonstrative way to Leyden.
Leyden is a quiet, curious old town, rich in history and effervescent with learning. With due respect to art, it was the birthplace of a dozen or more of the most illustrious Dutch painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, and last, but by no means least, the celebrated Rembrandt; but, strange to tell, it cannot boast of a single masterpiece of any of them. At its university, then renowned throughout the world, the future savants of the age came to pore over their books. Hugo Grotius was one of its earlier sons, and later, in 1755, at the age of twenty-seven, Oliver Goldsmith aspired in vain to the degree of Doctor of Medicine, afterwards conferred at Louwain, giving Leyden the first opportunity of being its donor. The town’s many museums—of ethnography, of natural history, of comparative anatomy, of physiology, of archeology—bespeak its hobby: the insatiable thirst for knowledge. Even many of the signs one reads in the town are in Latin.
An excellent way to go from The Hague to Leyden is by steam tram, the curious engine of which is shown here
Four hundred years ago Leyden could brag about its 100,000 population without treading on the toes of any city in Holland. To-day it contains little more than half as many souls as it did then. Since its “revision downward” from its pinnacle at the top of the Dutch textile industry, it has seemed a sacrilege to conduct business in the place. Its university sustained for a time the reputation that its weaving enterprises relinquished, but now we go to Vienna, instead of to Leyden, to glean the fine points in the science of medicine. Using Discovery for a fulcrum, Time undermines methods with the infallibility of the sun’s attraction, and brands them as obsolete forever.
The historical bench mark of Leyden is the siege it survived at the point of the Spanish bayonet in the sixteenth century. Lasting, in the aggregate, from October 31, 1573, until October 3, 1574, this siege may be considered as one of the longest and most persistent in the annals of history, and its ultimate relief was as characteristic, picturesque, and ingenious as if it had been the plot of a tale by Dumas.
At the expense of the lives of 4,000 patriots, himself included, Count Louis of Nassau effected a partial relief of Leyden five months after the siege commenced; but, encouraged by the butchery of this Dutch commander and his comparative handful of soldiers, the Spaniards continued to hold on so tenaciously that William the Silent concocted the daring scheme to flood the intervening country with water from the sea so that his fleet might sail in to the rescue.
Having already reduced Leyden to the point of starvation, Valdez, the Spanish general, in glowing phrases offered pardon to the citizens if they would but open the gates of the beleaguered city and surrender. But the people would have none of it, placing renewed confidences in their leader, William of Orange, and consoling themselves as best they could with the firm belief that he was listening to their prayers and would ultimately devise some means of raising the blockade.
As time dragged wearily on, the sorties of the Dutch became less frequent and, finally, it was announced by the din of clanging church bells that the gates should henceforth be kept closed and no man should venture outside the city.