and battered at its very verge, but from the flat coast and the
narrow world you can see the wave as far as you can see the water; and
the stormy light of a clear horizon is seen to be mobile and shifting
with the buoyant hillocks and their restless line.

Nowhere in Holland does there seem to be such a low sea-wall as secures
many a mile of gentle English coast to the east. The Dutch dyke has not
that aspect of a lowly parapet against a tide; it springs with a look of
haste and of height; and when you first run upstairs from the encumbered
Dutch fields to look at the sea, there is nothing in the least like
England; and even the Englishman of to-day is apt to share something of
the old perversity that was minded to cast derision upon the Dutch in
their encounters with the tides.

There has been some fault in the Dutch, making them subject to the slight
derision of the nations who hold themselves to be more romantic, and, as
it were, more slender. We English, once upon a time, did especially
flout the little nation then acting a history that proved worth the
writing. It may be no more than a brief perversity that has set a number
of our writers to cheer the memory of Charles II. Perhaps, even, it is
no more than another rehearsal of that untiring success at the expense of
the bourgeois. The bourgeois would be more simple than, in fact, he is
were he to stand up every time to be shocked; but, perhaps, the image of
his dismay is enough to reward the fancy of those who practise the wanton
art. And, when all is done, who performs for any but an imaginary
audience? Surely those companies of spectators and of auditors are not
the least of the makings of an author. A few men and women he achieves
within his books; but others does he create without, and to those figures
of all illusion makes the appeal of his art. More candid is the author
who has no world, but turns that appeal inwards to his own heart. He has
at least a living hearer.

This is by the way. Charles II has been cheered; the feat is done, the
dismay is imagined with joy. And yet the Merry Monarch's was a dismal
time. Plague, fire, the arrears of pension from the French King
remembered and claimed by the restored throne of England, and the Dutch
in the Medway--all this was disaster. None the less, having the vanity
of new clothes and a pretty figure, did we--especially by the mouth of
Andrew Marvell--deride our victors, making sport of the Philistin