Excerpt from The Peel Collection and the Dutch School of Painting<br><br>Elizabethan Englishman, he was dull, massive, narrow, and intolerant. But he took long views. His eyes were clear, and within his own horizon they saw what there was to be seen. His aspect towards those flowery sides of life which mean so much to men Of southern blood, was one of apparent indiflerence. We can find no evidence that woman's beauty appealed to him. Pretty women are rare in Holland, but they are rarer still in Dutch pictures, and none of the national fashions are based on a desire to enhance beauty or to bring out its characteristic lines. The very young Dutchwoman is often a fine animal, tall, well set up, muscular and supple. For years it was my habit, during annual visits to the Hague, to have breakfast at Scheveningen and sit an hour or so on the beach before beginning the day. The crowds of bathers gave one every Oppor tunity for a true estimate of the Dutch physique. I was often reminded of the famous letter in which Lady Mary Wortley describes her visit to the ladies' bath at Adrianople; for beautiful figures frequently atoned for the plainest of faces. But the Dutch take thought to deny every charm of limb and torso when they dress, and this seems to have been their habit always. A people with such tendencies can have little romantic about it. It cannot be a race of castle-builders, inventing ideals to pursue. The imagination must work by selection from experience, not by projection to unseen fields ahead. The faces immortalized in such pictures as the Shooter's Feast of Van der Helst, or the Syndics of Rembrandt, or the St. George's Guild of Frans Hals, entirely bear out this idea. In every feature they declare capacity for the work on hand, capacity to control and manipulate, to find the line of least resistance or to stand like a wall and defy. And the female groups - the Regents Of the Spin ning-house of Hals, for instance - show similar qualities. All these heads breathe a character diametrically opposed to that of the Celtic races. They are full of intellect, but of an intellect which deliber ately prefers the most familiar of truths to the most dazzling and romantic of fictions.<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.