From the picture in the Ryks Museum
Not all the poets, however, abused the Dutch. John Hagthorpe, in his England’s Exchequer in 1625 (written before the war: hence, perhaps, his kindness) thus addressed the “hollow land”:— Page 23
Fair Holland, had’st thou England’s chalky rocks,
To gird thy watery waist; her healthful mounts,
With tender grass to feed thy nibbling flocks:
Her pleasant groves, and crystalline clear founts,
Most happy should’st thou be by just accounts,
That in thine age so fresh a youth do’st feel
Though flesh of oak, and ribs of brass and steel.
But what hath prudent mother Nature held
From thee—that she might equal shares impart
Unto her other sons—that’s not compell’d
To be the guèrdons of thy wit and art?
And industry, that brings from every part
Of every thing the fairest and the best,
Like the Arabian bird to build thy nest?
Like the Arabian bird thy nest to build,
With nimble wings thou flyest for Indian sweets,
And incense which the Sabáan forests yield,
And in thy nest the goods of each pole meets,—
Which thy foes hope, shall serve thy funeral rites—
But thou more wise, secur’d by thy deep skill,
Dost build on waves, from fires more safe than hill.
To return to the severer critics—in 1664 was published a little book called The Dutch Drawn to the Life, a hostile work not improbably written with the intention of exciting English animosity to the point of war. A great deal was made of the success of the Dutch fisheries and the mismanagement of our own. The nation was criticised in all its aspects—“well nigh three millions of men, well-proportioned, great lovers of our English beer”. The following passage on the drinking capacity of the Dutch would have to be modified to-day:—
By their Excise, which riseth with their charge, the more money they pay, the more they receive again, in that insensible but profitable way: what is exhaled up in clouds, falls back again in showers: what the souldier receives in pay, he payes in Drink: their very enemies, though they hate the State, yet love their liquor, and pay excise: the most idle, slothful, and most improvident, that selleth his blood for drink, and his flesh for bread, serves at his own charge, for every pay day he payeth his sutler, and he the common purse.
Here are other strokes assisting to the protraiture “to the life” of this people: “Their habitations are kept handsomer than their bodies, and their bodies than their soules”.—“The Dutch man’s building is not large, but neat; handsome on the outside, on the inside hung with pictures and tapestry. He that hath not bread to eat hath a picture.”—“They are seldom deceived, for they will trust nobody. They may always deceive, for you must trust them, as for instance, if you travel, to ask a bill of Particulars is to purre in a wasp’s nest, you must pay what they ask as sure as if it were the assessment of a Subsidy.”
But the wittiest and shrewdest of the prose critics of Holland was Owen Feltham, from whom I quote later. His little book on the Low Countries is as packed with pointed phrase as a satire by Pope: the first half of it whimsically destructive, the second half eulogistic. It is he who charges the Dutch convivial spirits with drinking down the Evening Starre and drinking up the Morning Starre.