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 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