Andrew Marvell’s satire upon the Dutch is a capital instance of wit as distinguished from fun. It rather exercises than tickles the mind, so full is it of quaint fancy:
Holland, that scarce deserves the name
of land,
As but the offscouring of the British
sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the
lead,
Or what by ocean’s slow alluvium
fell
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
This indigestful vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Glad, then, as miners who have found the
ore
They, with mad labor, fished their land
to shore,
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth as if ’t had been of ambergreese
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear
away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles
roll.
Transfusing into them their sordid soul.
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!
Yet still his claim the injured ocean
laid.
And oft at leap-frog o’er their
steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what’s their mare
liberum;
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs
tan
Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
And, as they over the new level ranged,
For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
So rules among the drowned he that drains;
Who best could know to pump on earth a
leak,
Him they their lord and Country’s
Father speak.
To make a bank was a great plot of state,
Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived,
invades
The power, and grows, as ’t were,
a king of spades.
I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny, hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an epigram of two lines:
Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
May man undam you and God damn you all.