han what building swallows bear away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll.
Transfusing into them their sordid soul.

How did they rivet with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catched miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground!

Yet still his claim the injured ocean laid.
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples played,
As if on purpose it on land had come
To show them what's their _mare liberum_;
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sate, not as a meat, but as a guest;
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs tan
Whole shoals of Dutch served up as Caliban,
And, as they over the new level ranged,
For pickled herring pickled Heeren changed.
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
And as among the blind the blinkard reigns
So rules among the drowned he that drains;
Who best could know to pump on earth a leak,
Him they their lord and Country's Father speak.
To make a bank was a great plot of state,
Invent a shovel and be a magistrate;
Hence some small dykegrave, unperceived, invades
The power, and grows, as 't were, a king of spades.

I have cited this long passage not only because Marvell (both in his
serious and comic verse) is a great favorite of mine, but because it is
as good an illustration as I know how to find of that fancy flying off
into extravagance, and that nice compactness of expression, that
constitute genuine wit. On the other hand, Smollett is only funny,
hardly witty, where he condenses all his wrath against the Dutch into an
epigram of two lines:

Amphibious creatures, sudden be your fall,
May man undam you and God damn you all.

Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the
most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor.
With them, as Juvenal said of himself, "facit indignatio versus," and
wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor.
Swift, in the epitaph he wrote for himself, speaks of the grave as a
place "ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequeat," and this
hints at the sadness which makes the ground of all humor. There is
certainly humor in "Gulliver," especially in the chapters about the
Yahoos, where the horses are represented as the superior beings, and
disgusted at the filthiness of the creatures in human shape. But