barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their wat'ry Babel far more high
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky!
Yet still his claim the injur'd ocean laid,
And oft at leap-frog ore their steeples plaid:
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what's their _mare liberum_.
A daily deluge over them does boyl;
The earth and water play at level-coyl.
The fish oft times the burger dispossest,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest,
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw
Whole sholes of Dutch serv'd up for Cabillau;
Or, as they over the new level rang'd
For pickled herring, pickled _heeren_ chang'd.
Nature, it seem'd, asham'd of her mistake,
Would throw their land away at duck and drake.

The poor Dutch were never forgiven for living below the sea-level
and gaining their security by magnificent feats of engineering and
persistence. Why the notion of a reclaimed land should have seemed
so comic I cannot understand, but Marvell certainly justified the joke.

Later, Napoleon, who liked to sum up a nation in a phrase, accused
Holland of being nothing but a deposit of German mud, thrown there by
the Rhine: while the Duke of Alva remarked genially that the Dutch
were of all peoples those that lived nighest to hell; but Marvell's
sarcasms are the best. Indeed I doubt if the literature of droll
exaggeration has anything to compare with "The Character of Holland".

The satirist, now thoroughly warmed to his congenial task, continues:--

Therefore Necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
For, as with pygmees, who best kills the crane,
Among the hungry, he that treasures grain,
Among the blind, the one-ey'd blinkard reigns,
So rules among the drowned he that draines:
Not who first sees the rising sun, commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands;
Who best could know to pump an earth so leak,
Him they their Lord, and Country's Father, speak;
To make a bank, was a great plot of State,
Invent a shov'l, and be a magistrate.

So much for the conquest of Neptune, which in another nation were a
laudable enough enterprise. Marvell then passes on to the national
religion and the heterogeneity of Amsterdam:--

'Tis probable Religion, after this,
Came next in order, which they could not miss,
How could the Dutch but b