had come
    To show them what’s their mare liberum. 
    A daily deluge over them does boil;
    The earth and water play at level coil. 
    The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
    And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest.”

This final conceit greatly tickled the fancy of Charles Lamb, who was perhaps the first of the moderns to rediscover both the rare merits and the curiosities of our author.  Hazlitt thought poorly of the jest.[61:1]

Marvell proceeds with his ridicule to attack the magistrates:—­

    “For, as with pygmies, who best kills the crane;
    Among the hungry, he that treasures grain;
    Among the blind, the one-eyed blinkard reigns;
    So rules among the drowned, he that drains: 
    Not who first see 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 shovel, and be a magistrate."[62:1]

When the war-fever was raging such humour as this may well have passed muster with the crowd.

The incident—­there is always an “incident”—­which served as the actual excuse for hostilities, is referred to as follows:—­

“Let this one courtesy witness all the rest, When their whole navy they together pressed, Not Christian captives to redeem from bands, Or intercept the western golden sands, No, but all ancient rights and leagues must fail, Rather than to the English strike their sail; To whom their weather-beaten province owes Itself.”

Two spirited lines describe the discomfiture of Van Tromp:—­

    “And the torn navy staggered with him home
    While the sea laughed itself into a foam.”

This first Dutch War came to an end in 1654, when Holland was compelled to acknowledge the supremacy of the English flag in the home waters, and to acquiesce in the Navigation Act.  It is a curious commentary upon the black darkness that conceals the future, that Cromwell, dreading as he did the House of Orange and the youthful grandson of Charles the First, who at the appointed hour was destined to deal the House of Stuart a far deadlier stroke than Cromwell had been able to do, either on the field of battle or in front of Whitehall, refused to ratify the Treaty of Peace with the Dutch until John De Witt had obtained an Act excluding the Prince of Orange from ever filling the office of Stadtholder of the Province of Holland.

The contrast between the glory of Oliver’s Dutch War and the shame of Charles the Second’s sank deep into Marvell’s heart, and lent bitterness to many of his later satirical lines.