The road dates from 1666, its projector being Constantin Huyghens, poet and statesman, whose statue may be seen at the half-way halting-place.

By the time this is reached the charm of the road is nearly over: thenceforward it is all villas and Scheveningen.
But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet (which has the same meaning as _Sans Souci_), where two hundred years ago lived in genial retirement the writer who best represents the shrewd sagacity of the Dutch character--Jacob Cats, or Vader Cats as he was affectionately called, the author of the Dutch "Household Bible," a huge miscellaneous collection of wise saws and modern instances, humour and satire, upon all the businesses of life.
Mr.Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all he touches, has described in his _Side-Walk Studies_ the huge, illustrated edition of Cats' Works (Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly constituted old-fashioned Dutch households.

I have seen it at the British Museum, and it seems to me to be one of the best picture-books in the world.
As Mr.Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced in it.

"What would one not give for such an illustrated copy of Shakespeare! In these pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of the seventeenth century:--its vanes and spires and steep-roofed houses; its gardens with their geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped alleys and arches, their shining parallelograms of water.

Here are its old-fashioned interiors, with the deep fire-places and queer andirons, the huge four-posters, the prim portraits on the wall, the great brass-clamped coffers and carved _armories_ for the ruffs and starched collars and stiff farthingales of the women.