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 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