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 Philistines with
a proper national sense of enjoyment of such physical disabilities, or
such natural difficulties, or such misfavour of fortune, as may beset the
alien.

Especially were the denials of fortune matter for merriment. They are so
still; or they were so certainly in the day when a great novelist found
the smallness of some South German States to be the subject of unsating
banter. The German scenes at the end of "Vanity Fair," for example, may
prove how much the ridicule of mere smallness, fewness, poverty (and not
even real poverty, privation, but the poverty that shows in comparison
with the gold of great States, and is properly in proportion) rejoiced
the sense of humour in a writer and moralist who intended t