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;