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 could first discern the rising lands.

We have lost something more than the delighted laughter of Marvell, more than his practical joke, and more than the heart that was light in so burly a frame—­we have lost with these the wild humour that wore so well the bonds of two equal lines, and was wild with so much order, invention, malice, gaiety, polish, equilibrium, and vitality—­in a word, the Couplet, the couplet of the past.  We who cannot stand firm within two lines, but must slip beyond and between