CHAPTER II.
The Dutch in English Literature Hard things against the Dutch--Andrew Marvell's satire--The iniquity of living below sea-level--Historic sarcasms--"Invent a shovel and be a magistrate"-- Heterogeneity--Foot warmers--A champion of the Hollow Land--_The Dutch Drawn to the Life_--Dutch suspicion--Sir William Temple's opinion--and Sir Thomas Overbury's--Dr.Johnson's project--Dutch courtesy--Dutch discourtesy--National manners--A few phrases--The origin of "Dutch News"-- A vindication of Dutch courage.
To say hard things of the Dutch was once a recognised literary pastime.

At the time of our war with Holland no poet of any pretensions refrained from writing at least one anti-Batavian satire, the classical example of which is Andrew Marvell's "Character of Holland" (following Samuel Butler's), a pasquinade that contains enough wit and fancy and contempt to stock a score of the nation's ordinary assailants.

It begins perfectly:-- HOLLAND, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but th' off-scouring of the British sand, And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heav'd the lead, Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell Of shipwrackt cockle and the muscle-shell: This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.
Glad then, as miners who have found the ore They, with mad labour, fish'd the land to shoar And div'd as desperately for each piece Of earth, as if't had been of ambergreece; Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away; Or than those pills which sordid beetles roul, Transfusing into them their dunghil soul.
How did they rivet, with gigantick piles, Thorough the center their new-catched miles; And to the stake a struggling country bound, Where barking waves still bait the forced ground; Building their wat'ry Babel far more high To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky! Yet still his claim the injur'd ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog ore their steeples plaid: As if on purpose it on land had come To show them what's their _mare liberum_.
A daily deluge over them does boyl; The earth and water play at level-coyl.
The fish oft times the burger dispossest, And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest, And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw Whole sholes of Dutch serv'd up for Cabillau; Or, as they over the new level rang'd For pickled herring, pickled _heeren_ chang'd.
Nature, it seem'd, asham'd of her mistake, Would throw their land away at duck and drake.
The poor Dutch were never forgiven for living below the sea-level and gaining their security by magnificent feats of engineering and persistence.

Why the notion of a reclaimed land should have seemed so comic I cannot understand, but Marvell certainly justified the joke.
Later, Napoleon, who liked to sum up a nation in a phrase, accused Holland of being nothing but a deposit of German mud, thrown there by the Rhine: while the Duke of Alva remarked genially that the Dutch were of all peoples those that lived nighest to hell; but Marvell's sarcasms are the best.

Indeed I doubt if the literature of droll exaggeration has anything to compare with "The Character of Holland".
The satirist, now thoroughly warmed to his congenial task, continues:-- Therefore Necessity, that first made kings, Something like government among them brings; For, as with pygmees, who best kills the crane, Among the hungry, he that treasures grain, Among the blind, the one-ey'd blinkard reigns, So rules among the drowned he that draines: Not who first sees 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 shov'l, and be a magistrate.
So much for the conquest of Neptune, which in another nation were a laudable enough enterprise.