=1. Beginning of Better Days in Holland.=――At last, after the thick darkness and the waning stars, some faint streaks of dawn began slowly to appear. It was on ugly, flat, Dutch marshes that the new light of liberty first tremblingly broke, and its unaccustomed rays touched the sluggish canals and solid bridges of the ancient city of Amsterdam into a beauty that had been lacking to the picturesque minarets of Spain, and gave to the respectable Dutch burghers a dignity that is somehow absent from the stateliest of Spanish grandees. It was in 1591 that the first small settlement of Jews was made in Holland, and these earliest settlers were Marannos from Spain. Religious intolerance in the Peninsula had grown no less fierce since the days of Torquemada, and under the gloomy fanatic Philip II., the widower of our poor, merciless Queen Mary, all the worst terrors and persecutions of the Inquisition had been revived. The New Christians, or Marannos, as the disguised Jews of Spain and Portugal were called, felt, under Philip’s sway, less secure than ever from suspicion and its terrible consequences. Emigration seemed their only chance of safety, but, as of old, there was small choice of safe asylum. England and France were still closed against declared Jews; the Popes and princes of Italy were hostile to them; Germany was cruelly inhospitable; and Turkey sounded very foreign and very far off to these cultivated and somewhat self-indulgent Marannos. At last in their straits they bethought themselves of brave little Holland, whose people had fought as sturdily to guard their shores from the inroads of Inquisitors as from the inroads of the ocean, and had made of their enemy, the sea, an ally against the Spaniards.[44] In the States which had revolted from the cruel supremacy of Spain, and had struggled so heroically for national and religious independence, there seemed to be a certainty of freedom of conscience being accorded to all citizens. The Marannos had come to be very tired and very impatient of their masks, worn though they were amid the palms and the orange groves. And so it came to pass that, at the end of the sixteenth century, a little party of Spanish Jewish refugees made this fresh experiment for life, and were most kindly and generously received by the Protestant inhabitants of the new republic of the Netherlands.