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 to 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!