o teach
mankind to be less worldly. In Andrew Marvell's day they were even more
candid. The poverty of privation itself was provocative of the sincere
laughter of the inmost man, the true, infrequent laughter of the heart.
Marvell, the Puritan, laughed that very laughter--at leanness, at hunger,
cold, and solitude--in the face of the world, and in the name of
literature, in one memorable satire. I speak of "Flecno, an English
Priest in Rome," wherein nothing is spared--not the smallness of the
lodging, nor the lack of a bed, nor the scantiness of clothing, nor the
fast.

"This basso-rilievo of a man--"

personal meagreness is the first joke and the last.

It is not to be wondered at that he should find in the smallness of the
country of Holland matter for a cordial jest. But, besides the
smallness, there was that accidental and natural disadvantage in regard
to the sea. In the Venetians, commerce with the sea, conflict with the
sea, a victory over the sea, and the ensuing peace--albeit a less instant
battle and a more languid victory--were confessed to be noble; in the
Dutch they were grotesque. "With mad labour," says Andrew Marvell, with
the spirited consciousness of the citizen of a country well above ground
and free to watch the labour at leisure, "with mad labour" did the Dutch
"fish the land to shore."

How did they rivet with gigantic piles,
Thorough the centre, their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground;
Building their watery Babel far more high
To reach the sea than those to scale the sky!

It is done with a jolly wit, and in what admirable couplets!

The fish oft-times the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.

And it is even better sport that the astonished tritons and sea-nymphs
should find themselves provided with a capital _cabillau_ of shoals of
pickled Dutchmen (heeren for herring, says Marvell); and it must be
allowed that he rhymes with the enjoyment of irony. There is not a smile
for us in "Flecno," but it is more than possible to smile over this
"Character of Holland"; at the excluded ocean returning to play at leap-
frog over the steeples; at the rise of government and authority in
Holland, which belonged of right to the man who could best invent a
shovel or a pump, the country being so leaky:-

Not who first sees the rising sun commands,
But who cou