etchings and drawings give us numerous little illustrations in this respect, as may be seen from the superb drawing lately added to the British Museum by the Salting bequest, showing children going about with the star (a structure of oiled paper on a stick, lit from behind with a candle) on Epiphany-evening, and singing before the houses, as they also did, some months later, on Shrove Tuesday, accompanying their songs with the rommelpot, a musical instrument well known from Hals’s pictures, and consisting of an earthenware pot, covered with parchment or bladder, through which a stick was moved up and down (plates _24_ and _25_). Rembrandt’s etchings reproducing tramps and street-types, like his rat-killer, are no doubt so familiar to our readers that we need not recall them by means of reproductions. The tidiness and orderly habits of the Dutch were effective in putting limits to the disorder and dirt which are so often the nuisance of seaports. This was still more obvious in the interiors of the dwelling-houses where the Dutch housewives exerted the supremacy of their cleaning and washing propensity, « cette propriété hollandaise qui commence par étonner et qui finit, quand on demeure dans le pays, par devenir un besoin, une nécessite…une vertu contagieuse, » as Havard says. A similar sense of order was to be noted in the administration of public charities: orphanages, asylums, hospitals, and similar institutions were founded and generously endowed, mostly by private initiative, and were organised in such a careful and sensible way that most of them have lasted, under the same rules, until our days.(4) Ascending [Plate 26. A Quacksalver on a Market-Place. ] Plate 26. A Quacksalver on a Market-Place. After the drawing by Rembrandt. In the collection of Frederich August II, in Dresden. to higher levels we again observe, in the town’s democratic magistrates, that orderly spirit and caution which enabled these practical, vigilant authorities to consolidate the town’s importance and to develop it to the highest power in the Netherlands, dreaded by foreign competitors and possessing, so to say, the supremacy of the sea. They were characteristic representatives of the citizens’ nature: cool-headedness and a very strong feeling of independence, rooted in their own and their fathers’ emancipation from Spanish domination, and in their energetic tradesmanship. We here touch a more abstract subject, not less essential in constituting the general disposition of the town, namely, the nature and spirit of its individuals, forming, so to say, the town’s own soul. This is a point that should not be overlooked, as the Dutch character and demeanour are two things often misunderstood, which certainly require some insight and explanation in order to be appreciated.