rcept the western golden sands,
No, but all ancient rights and leagues must fail,
_Rather than to the English strike their sail_;
To whom their weather-beaten province owes
Itself."

Two spirited lines describe the discomfiture of Van Tromp:--

"And the torn navy staggered with him home
While the sea laughed itself into a foam."

This first Dutch War came to an end in 1654, when Holland was compelled
to acknowledge the supremacy of the English flag in the home waters, and
to acquiesce in the Navigation Act. It is a curious commentary upon the
black darkness that conceals the future, that Cromwell, dreading as he
did the House of Orange and the youthful grandson of Charles the First,
who at the appointed hour was destined to deal the House of Stuart a far
deadlier stroke than Cromwell had been able to do, either on the field
of battle or in front of Whitehall, refused to ratify the Treaty of
Peace with the Dutch until John De Witt had obtained an Act excluding
the Prince of Orange from ever filling the office of Stadtholder of the
Province of Holland.

The contrast between the glory of Oliver's Dutch War and the shame of
Charles the Second's sank deep into Marvell's heart, and lent bitterness
to many of his later satirical lines.

Marvell's famous _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland_ in
1650 has a curious bibliographical interest. So far as we can tell, it
was first published in 1776. When it was composed we do not know. At
Nunappleton House Oliver was not a _persona grata_ in 1650, for he had
no sooner come back from Ireland than he had stepped into the shoes of
the Lord-General Fairfax; and there were those, Lady Fairfax, I doubt
not, among the number, who believed that the new Lord-General thought it
was high time he should be where Fairfax's "scruple" at last put him. We
may be sure Cromwell's character was dissected even more than it was
extolled at Nunappleton. The famous Ode is by no means a panegyric, and
its true hero is the "Royal actor," whom Cromwell, so the poem suggests,
lured to his doom. It is not likely that the Ode was composed after
Marvell had left Nunappleton, though it may have been so before he went
there. There is an old untraceable tradition that Marvell was among the
crowd that saw the king die. What deaths have been witnessed, and with
what strange apparent apathy, by the London crowd! But for this
tradition one's imagination would trace to Lady Fairf