The universal Church is only there.
Nor can civility there want for tillage,
Where wisely for their Court, they chose a village:
How fit a title clothes their governours,
Themselves the hogs, as all their subject bores!
Let it suffice to give their country fame,
That it had one Civilis call'd by name,
Some fifteen hundred and more years ago,
But surely never any that was so.


There is something rather splendid in the attitude of a man who can
take a whole nation as his butt and bend every circumstance to his
purpose of ridicule and attack. Our satirists to-day are contented to
pillory individuals or possibly a sect or clique. Marvell's enjoyment
in his own exuberance and ingenuity is so apparent and infectious
that it matters nothing to us whether he was fair or unfair.

The end is inconclusive, being a happy recollection that he had
omitted any reference to _stoofjes_, the footstools filled with
burning peat which are used to keep the feet warm in church. Such
a custom was of course not less reprehensible than the building of
dykes to keep out the sea. Hence these eight lines, which, however,
would have come better earlier in the poem:--


See but their mermaids, with their tails of fish,
Reeking at church over the chafing-dish!
A vestal turf, enshrin'd in earthen ware,
Fumes through the loopholes of a wooden square;