as if the only appropriate costume in it were the plumed hat, the jack-boots, and the rapier that we meet with in the portraits of Rubens and Van der Helst.
Enkhuizen, at one time even more prosperous than Hoorn, has now only half Hoorn's population. Its sixty thousand inhabitants have come down to five thousand, and in its harbours, which are said to have once sent out one thousand vessels, there are fewer skiffs than are owned by the fishermen of Marken. And there is one peculiarity about its desolation. There are cities in the neighbouring Low Countries that have seen sad changes — Bruges and Ypres, for example. But Bruges and Ypres, like Hoorn, still cover very much their old extent of ground, though blocks and single houses have dropped out here and there, and although apartments go begging in the dwellings that remain. In Enkhuizen it is very different. A part of the old city is left in decay, but as for the rest, it has disappeared altogether as if its foundations had been razed and the ground swept clean. Long-abandoned sites, like Nineveh and Babylon, are still marked by artificial mounds bestrewed with fragments of brick and pottery. More than half of Enkhuizen is now a verdant meadow, although, if you dig deep beneath the surface, you will find traces in abundance of its departed life. Far away in the quiet of the country, strolling through the fields, M. Havard came upon a solitary gate that once gave access to the city on that side. What stifled the enterprise of Enkhuizen was the silting-up of its harbour: now it has fallen back on the manufacture of the buoys which are so much in demand on the shoals and banks that have been the ruin of it and other localities. But even in its depression and poverty it still finds money to spare for those benevolent objects to which the Dutch subscribe so generously. No city in Europe is more amply provided with charitable institutions than their capital of Amsterdam, and here at Enkhuizen there is an admirably conducted orphan asylum, dating from the more prosperous years of the city in the beginning of the seventeenth century.
But as each of these dying towns very much resembles another, it is not our purpose to follow M. Havard in his leisurely circumnavigation of the Zuyder Zee. We have borrowed nearly enough from him to indicate the changes that time and circumstances have brought about in the different provinces of a country that is generally prosperous, and to show that the parts that are the least visited by travellers are very far from being the least interesting. There is Medemblik, once the chief town of West Friesland, with a mint of its own, magnificent basins, spacious quays, and the finest shipbuilding-yards in the whole of Holland. These are all to be seen still, but there is scarcely a sign of life stirring in them. There are only three thousand souls left in the place, and they move about it like spectres gliding round a graveyard. Their sole means of communicating with the outer world are by a single small diligence, which crawls periodically to Hoorn. Harlingen, on the other hand, which lies on the opposite shore of the sea, has rallied again, and is become the great outlet for the cattle, the cheeses, the eggs, and the vegetables which are shipped from Friesland for the English markets. But at Hindelopen, which boasts an antiquity of some thousand years or more, the harbours have filled up, like those of Enkhuizen, till you must pole the boat along among the rank growth of matted weeds that makes the port resemble a polder. Stavoren used to make treaties of its own with foreign nations, and is said at one time to have held the third place in the Hanseatic League. Now Stavoren has dwindled to some hundred houses, half of them falling into ruins; and it has hardly five times as many inhabitants. Kampen was made a city of the empire when Maximilian met the diet at Worms. Its citizens had protected themselves and their wealth with walls and towers, and deep fosses that were flooded from the Yssel. It still shows signs of healthy life, though its streets are ill-paved and many of its houses out of repair; but in spite of the vulgarity of reviving prosperity, M. Havard found it as well worth visiting as any of its neighbours, for its inhabitants have been careful to preserve the monuments of its earlier splendour. They have levelled their walls to let in light and air, but they have laid out the site in gardens and turned their city ditches into stretches of ornamental water. There are plate, paintings, and wood sculptures to be seen in the Stadhuis and elsewhere; there are books in the town library; there are the remains of a number of monastic institutions, for Kampen was Catholic and munificent: above all, some superb gates are left standing, and set off by the trees, shrubs, and flowers that have been planted around them. Then there is Harderwyk, a little town, a sort of Chatham
