our
of the medal we claim, but the invention belongs to his country. The
Dutch went on commenting in this manner on English affairs from reign to
reign. Charles the Second declared war against them in 1672 for a
malicious medal, though the States-General offered to break the die, by
purchasing it of the workman for one thousand ducats; but it served for
a pretext for a Dutch war, which Charles cared more about than the _mala
bestia_ of his exergue. Charles also complained of a scandalous picture
which the brothers de Witt had in their house, representing a naval
battle with the English. Charles the Second seems to have been more
sensible to this sort of national satire than we might have expected in
a professed wit; a race, however, who are not the most patient in having
their own sauce returned to their lips. The king employed Evelyn to
write a history of the Dutch war, and "enjoined him _to make it a little
keen_, for the Hollanders had very unhandsomely abused him in their
pictures, books, and libels." The Dutch continued their career of
conveying their national feeling on English affairs more triumphantly
when their Stadtholder ascended an English throne. The birth of the
Pretender is represented by the chest which Minerva gave to the
daughters of Cecrops to keep, and which, opened, discovered an infant
with a serpent's tail: _Infantemque vident apporrectumque draconem_; the
chest perhaps alluding to the removes of the warming-pan; and, in
another, James and a Jesuit flying in terror, the king throwing away a
crown and sceptre, and the Jesuit carrying a child; _Ite missa est_, the
words applied from the mass.[101] But in these contests of national
feeling, while the grandeur of Louis the Fourteenth did not allow of
these ludicrous and satirical exhibitions, and while the political
idolatry which his forty Academicians paid to him exhausted itself in
the splendid fictions of a series of famous medals, amounting to nearly
four hundred, it appears that we were not without our reprisals; for I
find Prosper Marchand, who writes as a Hollander, censuring his own
country for having at length adulated the grand monarque by a
complimentary medal. He says--"The English cannot be reproached with a
similar _debonairete_." After the famous victories of Marlborough, they
indeed inserted in a medal the head of the French monarch and the
English queen, with this inscription, _Ludovicus Magnus, Anna Major_.
Long ere this one of our q