The next day we arrived at Dort, the first town of Holland, furnished with all German commodities, and especially Rhenish wines and timber. It hath almost at the extremity a very spacious and venerable church; a stately senate house, wherein was holden that famous synod against the Arminians in 1618 (( [From 13th November, 1618, to 19th May, 1619- Its object was to effect a compromise between the Arminians and the Calvinists ; but the latter prevailed.] –AD)); and in that hall hangeth a picture of “The Passion,” an exceeding rare and much-esteemed piece.

From Dort, being desirous to hasten toward the army, I took wagon this afternoon to Rotterdam, whither we were hurried in less than an hour, though it be ten miles distant; so furiously do those Foremen drive. I went first to visit the great church, the Doole, the Bourse, and the public statue of the learned Erasmus, of brass. (([In the Groote Markt. It is by Hendrik de Keyser, and was erected in 1522. – AH])) They showed us his house, or rather the mean cottage, wherein he was born, over which there are extant these lines, in capital letters:

“ÆDIBUS HIS ORTUS, MUNDUM DECORAVIT ERASMUS
ARTIBUS INGENIO, RELIGIONE, FIDE. (([In the last chapter of Charles Reade’s The Cloister and the Hearth, 1861, some of the best scenes in which are confessedly from the “mediaeval pen” of Erasmus, the motto “over the tailor’s house in the Brede-Kirk Straet ” is given as—“ Haec est parva domus natus qua magnus Erasmus.” But further alterations must now have taken place, for according to Baedeker, “the façade of the house No. 5 in this street [the Wyde Kerkstraat], with a statuette of Erasmus in the pediment, is an exact repro- duction of the front of the house in which the great scholar was born” (Belgium and Holland, 1905, p. 294).]))