EUROPE TO-DAY

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 227, 24 August 1938, Page 11

EUROPE TO-DAY

GREAT FOLK OF THE LOW COUNTRIES. Who are the immortals of the Low Countries ? Their names should be in our thoughts as we travel through Holland and Belgium. Among them we must include Rembrandt, who was born in Leyden in 1606. one of the most intensely human of all great artists. Another artist of whom we think here is Van Dyck, born in Antwerp in 1599, a painter of rare distinction and greatly honoured in our own land. We' think of the Low Countries .as the home of that astonishing genius Peter Paul Rubens, who settled at Antwerp, in 1609 tand was Court painter. The great exponent of Flemish art, this masterly man of affairs, as brilliant as a statesman as he was as an artist, has given us priceless pictures for our galleries. We come to the Low Countries re-

membering the great Erasmus who was born at Rotterdam in 1466, and may be said to have done more for religious liberty than any other man of his time. And there comes to mind yet another thoughtful scholar of these flat' lands, Spinoza, son of a Portuguese Jew, but born in Amsterdam, and therefore hailed as one of the distinguished products of the Low Countries.

" Yet another illustrious soul is linked with this region, for Thomas a Kempis lived for many years at the Agnetenberg Convent' near Zwolle, and all who know anything of his beautiful life and his holy writings will have him in their thoughts as they look over the quiet scenes on which he must have set eyes long ago. Very different was another man whose name is honoured here—Mercator, the great Flemish geographer, horn at Rupelmonde in 1512. —(G.)