Note 176 — XVI

Van der Linde takes exception to this part of the chronicle. He says that Zell’s knowledge of geography was confused, and that he wrote Holland where he should have written the Netherlands. His reasons for suggesting this correction are, that the manufacture of block-books and the prints of images, and the cultivation of literature and of literary arts, during the first half of the fifteenth century, were in their most flourishing condition in the cities of Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels and Louvain, all of the Southern Netherlands, while they were comparatively neglected in Haarlem, Leyden, Delft and Utrecht, of the Northern Netherlands. At that period Holland had not taken its place as the foremost state of Europe, in its championship of liberty and civilization.