what building swallows bear away; Or than those pills which sordid beetles roul, Transfusing into them their dunghil soul. How did they rivet, with gigantick piles, Thorough the center their new-catch��d miles; And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forc��d 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 be converted, when Th' Apostles were so many fishermen? Besides, the waters of themselves did rise, And, as their land, so them did re-baptize. Though Herring for their God few voices mist, And Poor-John to have been th' Evangelist, Faith, that could never twins conceive before, Never so fertile, spawn'd upon this shore More pregnant than their Marg'ret, that laid down For Hans-in-Kelder of a whole Hans-Town. Sure when Religion did itself imbark, And from the East would Westward steer its ark, It struck, and splitting on this unknown ground, Each one thence pillag'd the first piece he found: Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew, Staple of sects, and mint of schisme grew; That bank of conscience, where not one so strange Opinion but finds credit, and exchange. In vain for Catholicks ourselves we bear; The universal Church is only there. Nor can civility there want for tillage, Where wisely for their Court, they chose a village: How fit a title clothes their governours, Themselves the hogs, as all their subject bores! Let it suffice to give their country fame, That it had one Civilis call'd by name, Some fifteen hundred and more years ago, But surely never any that was so.
There is something rather splendid in the attitude of a man who can take a whole nation as his butt and bend every circumstance to his purpose of ridicule and attack. Our satirists to-day are contented to pillory individuals or possibly a sect or clique. Marvell's enjoyment in his own exuberance and ingenuity is so apparent and infectious that it matters nothing to us whether he was fair or unfair.
The end is inconclusive, being a happy recollection that he had omitted any reference to stoofjes, the footstools filled with burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however, would have come better earlier in the poem:--
See but their mermaids, with their tails of fish, Reeking at church over the chafing-dish! A vestal turf, enshrin'd in earthen ware, Fumes through the loopholes of a wooden square; Each to the temple
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