Biographia borealis ; or, lives of distinguished Northerns / By Hartley Coleridge.

  • Hartley Coleridge
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Biographia borealis ; or, lives of distinguished Northerns / By Hartley Coleridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cultivated, both from our interest as.a mercantile, and our duty as a Protestant people. But the prosperity of a Republic is an abomination in the eyes of the liberty-haters even unto this day. We are sorry that Marvell had, by a satirical piece (published probably during the Protectorate), contributed to influence the national prejudices of the vulgar against the Dutch, and what is still worse, he makes the natural disadvantages which it was the glory of that industrious race to have surmounted, a topic of ridicule and insult :— “ Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As but the offscouring 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 ship-wreck’d cockle and the muscle shell. This indigested vomit of the sea Fell on the Dutch by just propriety : Glad, then, as miners who have found the ore, They with mad labour fish’d the land to shore, And dived as desperately for each piece Of earth as if it had been of ambergrease, Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away, Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll, Transfusing into them their dunghill soul. Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid, And oft at leap-frog o’er their steeples play’d ; As if on purpose it on land had come, To shew them what’s their mare liberum.* A daily deluge over them does boil ; The earth and water play at level coyl. The first oft times the burgher dispossess’d, And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest; And oft the tritons and the sea nymphs saw, Whole shoals of Dutch serv’d up for cabillau. Nature, it seem’d, asham’d of her mistake, Would throw their lands away at duck and drake ; Therefore necessity, that first made kings, Something like government among them brings. For, as with pygmy’s, who best kill 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 drains, Not who first see the rising sun commands: But who could first discover the rising lands. * According to the work of Grotiu so named, which was answered by Selden in his Mare Clausum.
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