Rees is near enough to Holland to have some of its advantages; and, whatever contempt it may be natural for English travellers, at the commencement of their tour, to feel for Dutch dullness and covetousness, nothing but some experience of Germany is necessary to make them rejoice in a return to the neatness, the civility, the comforts, quietness, and even the good humour and intelligence to be easily found in Holland. Such, at least, was the change, produced in our minds by a journey from Nimeguen to Friburg. The lower classes of the Dutch, and it is the conduct of such classes, that every where has the chief influence upon the comforts of others, are not only without the malignant sullenness of the Germans, and, therefore, ready to return you services for money, but are also much superior to them in intelligence and docility. Frequent opportunities of gain, and the habit of comparing them, sharpen intellects, which might otherwise never be exercised. In a commercial country, the humblest persons have opportunities of profiting by their qualifications; they are, therefore, in some degree, prepared for better conditions, and do not feel that angry envy of others, which arises from the consciousness of some irremediable distinction. The inhabitants of Rees speak both Dutch and German; and it was pleasing to hear at the inn the sulky _yaw_ of the latter exchanged for the civil _Yaw well, Mynheer_, of the Dutch. The town is built chiefly of brick, like those in Holland; the streets light; the market-place spacious, and the houses well preserved. It is of no great extent, but the space within the walls is filled, though this must have been sometimes partly cleared by the sieges, to which Rees was subject in the war of Philip the Second upon the Dutch. A few emigrants from Brussels and Maestricht were now sheltered in it; but there was no garrison and no other symptom of its neighbourhood to the scenes of hostilities, than the arrival of a Prussian commissary to collect hay and corn. We were cheered by the re-appearance of prosperity in a country, where it is so seldom to be seen, and passed a better evening in this little town, than in any other between Friburg and Holland. In the morning, having no disgust to impel us, we were somewhat tardy in embarking; and the boatmen, who had found out the way of reviving our impatience, talked of the great distance of Holland, till they had us on board. Five or six well-looking villages presently appear after leaving Rees, the next port to which is Emmerick, once an Hanseatic town, and still a place of some dignity, from spires and towers, but certainly not of much commerce, for we could not see more than two vessels on the beach.