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;
    Each to the temple with these altars tend,
    But still does place it at her western end;
    While the fat steam of female sacrifice
    Fills the priest’s nostrils, and puts out his eyes.

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":—­

    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 guerdons 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 Sabaan 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