To William Ramsden, Esq.
“June 10, 1678.
“Dear Will,—I have time to tell you thus much of publick matters. The patience of the Scots, under their oppressions, is not to be paralleled in any history. They still continue their extraordinary and numerous, but peaceable, field conventicles. One Mr. Welch is their arch-minister, and the last letter I saw tells, people were going forty miles to hear him. There came out, about Christmas last, here, a large book concerning the growth of popery and arbitrary government. There have been great rewards offered in private, and considerable in the Gazette, to any one who could inform of the author or printer, but not yet discovered. Three or four printed books since have described, as near as it was proper to go, the man being a Member of Parliament, Mr. Marvell, to have been the author; but if he had, surely he should not have escaped being questioned in Parliament or some other place. My good wishes attend you.”
The last letter Andrew Marvell wrote to his constituents is dated July 6, 1678. The member for Hull died in August 1678. The Parliament in which he had sat continuously for eighteen years was at last dissolved on the 30th of December in the year of his death.
181:1 Grosart, vol. iv. p. 248.
183:1 Ranke’s History of England, vol. iii. p. 471.
185:1 Ranke, vol. iii. p. 520.
187:1 Grosart, vol. iv. (Growth of Popery), p. 275.
187:2 Ibid., p. 279.
189:1 See note to Dr. Airy’s edition of Burnet’s History, vol. ii. p. 73.
199:1 Marvell’s commendatory verses on “Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost” (so entitled in the volume of 1681) were first printed in the Second Edition (1674) of Milton’s great poem. Marvell did not agree with Dryden in thinking that Paradise Lost would be improved by rhyme, and says so in these verses.
202:1 Printed in Captain Thompson’s edition, vol. i. p. 432.
204:1 Grosart, vol. iv. p. 304.
205:1 Grosart, vol. iv. p. 308.
206:1 Grosart, vol. iv. p. 322.
209:1 Grosart, vol. iv. p. 327.
210:1 This story is first told in a balder form by Cooke in his edition of 1726. It may be read as Cooke tells it in the Dictionary of National Biography, xxxvi., p. 329. There was probably some foundation for it.
CHAPTER VII
FINAL SATIRES AND DEATH
Marvell was no orator or debater, and though a member of Parliament for nearly eighteen years, but rarely opened his mouth in the House of Commons. His old enemy, Samuel Parker, whilst venting his posthumous spite upon the author of the Rehearsal Transprosed, would have us believe “that our Poet could not speak without a sound basting: whereupon having frequently undergone this discipline, he learnt at length to hold his tongue.” There is no good reason for believing the Bishop of Oxford, but it is the fact that, however taught, Marvell had learnt to hold his tongue. His longest reported speech will be found in the Parliamentary History, vol. iv. p. 855.1 When we remember how frequently in those days Marvell’s pet subjects were under fierce discussion, we must recognise how fixed was his habit of self-repression.
On one occasion only are we enabled to catch a glimpse of Marvell “before the Speaker.” It was in March 1677, and is thus reported in the Parliamentary History, though no mention of the incident is made in the Journals of the House:—
“Debate on Mr. Andrew Marvell’s striking Sir Philip Harcourt, March 29.—Mr. Marvell, coming up the house to his place, stumbling at Sir Philip Harcourt’s foot, in recovering himself, seemed to give Sir Philip a box on the ear. The Speaker acquainting the house ‘That he saw a box on the ear given, and it was his duty to inform the house of it,’ this debate ensued.
“Mr. Marvell. What passed was through great acquaintance and familiarity betwixt us. He neither gave him an affront, nor intended him any. But the Speaker cast a severe reflection upon him yesterday, when he was out of the house, and he hopes that, as the Speaker keeps us in order, he will keep himself in order for the future.
“Sir John Ernly. What the Speaker said yesterday was in Marvell’s vindication. If these two gentlemen are friends already, he would not make them friends, and would let the matter go no further.
“Sir Job. Charlton is sorry a thing of this nature has happened, and no more sense of it. You in the Chair, and a stroke struck! Marvell deserves for his reflection on you, Mr. Speaker, to be called in question. You cannot do right to the house unless you question it; and moves to have Marvell sent to the Tower.
“The Speaker. I saw a blow on one side, and a stroke on the other.
“Sir Philip Harcourt. Marvell had some kind of a stumble, and mine was only a thrust; and the thing was accidental.
“Sir H. Goodrick. The persons have declared the thing to be accidental, but if done in jest, not fit to be done here. He believes it an accident, and hopes the house thinks so too.
“Mr. Sec. Williamson. This does appear, that the action for that time was in some heat. He cannot excuse Marvell who made a very severe reflection on the Speaker, and since it is so enquired, whether you have done your duty, he would have Marvell withdraw, that you may consider of it.
“Col. Sandys. Marvell has given you trouble, and instead of excusing himself, reflects upon the Speaker: a strange confidence, if not an impudence!
“Mr. Marvell. Has so great a respect to the privilege, order, and decency, of the house, that he is content to be a sacrifice for it. As to the casualty that happened, he saw a seat empty, and going to sit in it, his friend put him by, in a jocular manner, and what he did was of the same nature. So much familiarity has ever been between them, that there was no heat in the thing. He is sorry he gave an offence to the house. He seldom speaks to the house, and if he commit an error, in the manner of his speech, being not so well tuned, he hopes it is not an offence. Whether out or in the house, he has a respect to the Speaker. But he has been informed that the Speaker resumed something he had said, with reflection. He did not think fit to complain of Mr. Seymour to Mr. Speaker. He believes that is not reflective. He desires to comport himself with all respect to the house. This passage with Harcourt was a perfect casualty, and if you think fit, he will withdraw, and sacrifice himself to the censure of the house.
“Sir Henry Capel. The blow given Harcourt was with his hat; the Speaker cast his eye upon both of them, and both respected him. He would not aggravate the thing. Marvell submits, and he would have you leave the thing as it is.
“Sir Robert Holmes saw the whole action. Marvell flung about three or four times with his hat, and then gave Harcourt a box on the ear.
“Sir Henry Capel desires, now that his honour is concerned, that Holmes may explain, whether he saw not Marvell with his hat only give Harcourt the stroke ‘at that time.’ Possibly ‘at another time’ it might be.
“The Speaker. Both Holmes and Capel are in the right. But Marvell struck Harcourt so home, that his fist, as well as his hat, hit him.
“Sir R. Howard hopes the house will not have Harcourt say he received a blow, when he has not. He thinks what has been said by them both sufficient.
“Mr. Garraway hopes, that by the debate we shall not make the thing greater than it is. Would have them both reprimanded for it.
“Mr. Sec. Williamson submits the honour of the house to the house. Would have them made friends, and give that necessary assurance to the house, and he, for his part, remains satisfied.
“Sir Tho. Meres. By our long sitting together, we lose, by our familiarity and acquaintance, the decencies of the house. He has seen 500 in the house, and people very orderly; not so much as to read a letter, or set up a foot. One could scarce know anybody in the house, but him that spoke. He would have the Speaker declare that order ought to be kept; but as to that gentleman (Marvell) to rest satisfied.”
The general impression left upon the mind is that of a friendly-familiar but choleric gentleman, full of likes and dislikes, readier with his tongue in the lobby than with “set” speeches in the Chamber. A solitary politician with a biting pen. Satirists must not complain if they have enemies.
Marvell’s vein of satire was never worked out, and the political poems of his last decade are fuller than ever of a savage humour. How he kept his ears is a repeated wonder. He is said to have been on terms of intimate friendship with Prince Rupert, and it is a steady tradition that the king was one of his amused readers. It is hard to believe that even Charles the Second could have seen any humour, good or bad, in such a couplet:—
Looks as a thing set up to scare the crows.”
Nor can the following verses have been read with much pleasure, either at Whitehall or in a punt whilst fishing at Windsor. Their occasion was the setting up in the stocks-market in the City of London of a statue of the king by Sir Robert Viner, a city knight, to whom Charles was very heavily in debt. Sir Robert, having a frugal mind, had acquired a statue of John Sobieski trampling on the Turk, which, judiciously altered, was made to pass muster so as to represent the Pensioner of Louis the Fourteenth and the Vendor of Dunkirk trampling on Oliver Cromwell.
Do at their own charges their citadels build;
So Sir Robert advanced the King’s statue in token
Of bankers defeated, and Lombard Street broken.
Obliging the city with a King and a steed;
When with honour he might from his word have gone back;
He that vows in a calm is absolved by a wrack.
To be a revenge and a malice forecast;
Upon the King’s birthday to set up a thing
That shows him a monkey much more than a King.
Yet all do affirm that the King is much worse;
And some by the likeness Sir Robert suspect
That he did for the King his own statue erect.
Who up on their panniers more gracefully rid;
And so loose in his seat—that all persons agree,
E’en Sir William Peak1 sits much firmer than he.
’Tis the ’graver at work, to reform him, so long;
But, alas! he will never arrive at his end,
For it is such a King as no chisel can mend.
If ever you hope in December for spring;
For though all the world cannot show such another,
Yet we’d rather have him than his bigoted brother.”
Of a more exalted vein of satire the following extract may serve as an example:—
To trembling James, would I had quitted mine.
Cubs didst thou call them? Hadst thou seen this brood
Of earls, and dukes, and princes of the blood,
No more of Scottish race thou would’st complain,
Those would be blessings in this spurious reign.
Awake, arise from thy long blessed repose,
Once more with me partake of mortal woes!
Oh! mighty queen, why so untimely dressed?
Whilst the lewd court in drunken slumber lies,
I stole away, and never will return,
Till England knows who did her city burn;
Till cavaliers shall favourites be deemed,
And loyal sufferers by the court esteemed;
Till Leigh and Galloway shall bribes reject;
Thus Osborne’s golden cheat I shall detect:
Till atheist Lauderdale shall leave this land,
And Commons’ votes shall cut-nose guards disband:
Till Kate a happy mother shall become,
Till Charles loves parliaments, and James hates Rome.
Your once loved court, and martyr’s progeny?
Pimps, priests, buffoons, i’ the privy-chamber sport.
Such slimy monsters ne’er approached the throne
Since Pharaoh’s reign, nor so defiled a crown.
I’ the sacred ear tyrannic arts they croak,
Pervert his mind, his good intentions choke;
Tell him of golden Indies, fairy lands,
Leviathan, and absolute commands.
Thus, fairy-like, the King they steal away,
And in his room a Lewis changeling lay.
How oft have I him to himself restored.
In’s left the scale, in ’s right hand placed the sword?
Taught him their use, what dangers would ensue
To those that tried to separate these two?
The bloody Scottish chronicle turned o’er,
Showed him how many kings, in purple gore,
Were hurled to hell, by learning tyrant lore?
The other day famed Spenser I did bring,
In lofty notes Tudor’s blest reign to sing;
How Spain’s proud powers her virgin arms controlled,
And golden days in peaceful order rolled;
How like ripe fruit she dropped from off her throne,
Full of grey hairs, good deeds, and great renown.
...
Snatch him again from scandal and the grave;
Present to ’s thoughts his long-scorned parliament,
The basis of his throne and government.
In his deaf ears sound his dead father’s name:
Perhaps that spell may ’s erring soul reclaim:
Who knows what good effects from thence may spring?
’Tis godlike good to save a falling king.
The Stuart from the tyrant to divide;
As easily learned virtuosos may
With the dog’s blood his gentle kind convey
Into the wolf, and make his guardian turn
To the bleating flock, by him so lately torn:
If this imperial juice once taint his blood,
’Tis by no potent antidote withstood.
Tyrants, like lep’rous kings, for public weal
Should be immured, lest the contagion steal
Over the whole. The elect of the Jessean line
To this firm law their sceptre did resign;
And shall this base tyrannic brood invade
Eternal laws, by God for mankind made?
From her sage mouth famed principles to know;
With her the prudence of the ancients read,
To teach my people in their steps to tread;
By their great pattern such a state I’ll frame,
Shall eternize a glorious lasting name.
Till then, my Raleigh, teach our noble youth
To love sobriety, and holy truth;
Watch and preside over their tender age,
Lest court corruption should their souls engage;
Teach them how arts, and arms, in thy young days,
Employed our youth—not taverns, stews, and plays;
Tell them the generous scorn their race does owe
To flattery, pimping, and a gaudy show;
Teach them to scorn the Carwells, Portsmouths, Nells,
The Clevelands, Osbornes, Berties, Lauderdales:
Poppaea, Tigelline, and Arteria’s name,
All yield to these in lewdness, lust, and fame.
Make them admire the Talbots, Sydneys, Veres,
Drake, Cavendish, Blake, men void of slavish fears,
True sons of glory, pillars of the state,
On whose famed deeds all tongues and writers wait.
When with fierce ardour their bright souls do burn,
Back to my dearest country I’ll return.”
The dialogue between the two horses, which bore upon their respective backs the stone effigies of Charles the First at Charing Cross and Charles the Second at Wool-Church, is, in its own rough way, masterly satire for the popular ear.
To believe man and beast have spoken in effigy,
Why should we not credit the public discourses,
In a dialogue between two inanimate horses?
The horses I mean of Wool-Church and Charing,
Who told many truths worth any man’s hearing,
Since Viner and Osborn did buy and provide ’em
For the two mighty monarchs who now do bestride ’em.
The stately brass stallion, and the white marble steed,
The night came together, by all ’tis agreed;
When both kings were weary of sitting all day,
They stole off, incognito, each his own way;
And then the two jades, after mutual salutes,
Not only discoursed, but fell to disputes.”
The dialogue is too long to be quoted. Charles the Second’s steed boldly declares:—
I freely declare it, I am for old Noll;
Though his government did a tyrant resemble,
He made England great, and his enemies tremble.”
Mr. Hollis, when he sent the picture of Cromwell by Cooper to Sidney Sussex College, is said to have written beneath it the lines just quoted.
The satire ends thus:—
Thy oppression together with kingship shall die.
For the gods have repented the King’s restoration.”
These probably are the lines which spread the popular, but mistaken, belief that Marvell was a Republican.
Andrew Marvell died in his lodgings in London on the 16th of August 1678. Colonel Grosvenor, writing to George Treby, M.P. (afterwards Chief of the Common Pleas), on the 17th of August, reports “Andrew Marvell died yesterday of apoplexy.” Parliament was not sitting at the time. What was said of the elder Andrew may also be said of the younger: he was happy in the moment of his death. The one just escaped the Civil War, the other the Popish Plot.
Marvell was thought to have been poisoned. Such a suspicion in those bad times was not far-fetched. His satires, rough but moving, had been widely read, and his fears for the Constitution, his dread of
The ugliest Giant ever trod the earth,”
infested many breasts, and bred terror.
Stood in the gap and bravely kept his post.”
The post was one of obvious danger, and
Remains in doubt.”1
The doubt has now been dissipated by the research of an accomplished physician, Dr. Gee, who in 1874 communicated to the Athenæum (March 7, 1874) an extract from Richard Morton’s Πυρετολογἱα (1692), containing a full account of Marvell’s sickness and death. Art “untwin’d his thread,” but it was the doctor’s art. Dr. Gee’s translation of Morton’s medical Latin is as follows:—
“In this manner was that most famous man Andrew Marvell carried off from amongst the living before his time, to the great loss of the republic, and especially the republic of letters; through the ignorance of an old conceited doctor, who was in the habit on all occasions of raving excessively against Peruvian bark, as if it were a common plague. Howbeit, without any clear indication, in the interval after a third fit of regular tertian ague, and by way of preparation (so that all things might seem to be done most methodically), blood was copiously drawn from the patient, who was advanced in years.” [Here follow more details of treatment, which I pass over.] “The way having been made ready after this fashion, at the beginning of the next fit, a great febrifuge was given, a draught, that is to say, of Venice treacle, etc. By the doctor’s orders, the patient was covered up close with blankets, say rather, was buried under them; and composed himself to sleep and sweat, so that he might escape the cold shivers which are wont to accompany the onset of the ague-fit. He was seized with the deepest sleep and colliquative sweats, and in the short space of twenty-four hours from the time of the ague-fit, he died comatose. He died, who, had a single ounce of Peruvian bark been properly given, might easily have escaped, in twenty-four hours, from the jaws of the grave and the disease: and so burning with anger, I informed the doctor, when he told me this story without any sense of shame.”
Marvell was buried on the 18th of August, “under the pews in the south side of St. Giles’s Church in the Fields, under the window wherein is painted on glass a red lion.” So writes the invaluable Aubrey, who tells us he had the account from the sexton who made the grave.
In 1678 St. Giles’s Church was a brick structure built by Laud. The present imposing church was built on the site of the old one in 1730-34.
In 1774 Captain Thompson, so he tells us, “visited the grand mausoleum under the church of St. Giles, to search for the coffin in which Mr. Marvell was placed: in this vault were deposited upwards of a thousand bodies, but I could find no plate of an earlier date than 1722; I do therefore suppose the new church is built upon the former burial place.”
The poet’s grand-nephew, Mr. Robert Nettleton, in 1764 placed on the north side of the present church, upon a black marble slab, a long epitaph, still to be seen, recording the fact that “near to this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esquire.” At no great distance from this slab is the tombstone, recently brought in from the graveyard outside, of Georgius Chapman, Poeta, a fine Roman monument, prepared by the care and at the cost of the poet’s friend, Inigo Jones. Still left exposed, in what is now a doleful garden (not at all Marvellian), is the tombstone of Richard Penderel of Boscobel, one of the five yeomen brothers who helped Charles to escape after Worcester. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in 1648, and Shirley the dramatist, in 1666, had been carried to the same place of sepulture.
Aubrey describes Marvell “as of middling stature, pretty strong-set, roundish faced, cherry-cheeked, hazell eye, brown hair. He was, in his conversation, very modest, and of very few words. Though he loved wine, he would never drink hard in company, and was wont to say that he would not play the good fellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life. He kept bottles of wine at his lodgings, and many times he would drink liberally by himself and to refresh his spirit and exalt his muse. James Harrington (author of Oceana) was his intimate friend; J. Pell, D.D., was one of his acquaintances. He had not a general acquaintance.”
Dr. Pell, one may remark, was a great friend of Hobbes.
In March 1679 joint administration was granted by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, Mariæ Marvell relictæ et Johni Greni Creditori. This is the first time we hear of there being any wife in the case. A creditor of a deceased person could not obtain administration without citing the next of kin, but a widow was entitled, under a statute of Henry viii., as of right, to administration, and it may be that Mr. Green thought the quickest way of being paid his debt was to invent a widow. The practice of the court required an affidavit from the widow deposing that she was the lawful relict of the deceased, but this assertion on oath seems in ordinary cases to have been sufficient, if the customary fees were forthcoming. Captain Thompson roundly asserts that the alleged Mary Marvell was a cheat, and no more than the lodging-house keeper where he had last lived—and Marvell was a migratory man.1 Mary Marvell’s name appears once again, in the forefront of the first edition of Marvell’s Poems (1681), where she certifies all the contents to be her husband’s works. This may have been a publisher’s, as the affidavit may have been a creditor’s, artifice. As against this, Mr. Grosart, who believed in Mary Marvell, reminds us that Mr. Robert Boulter, the publisher of the poems, was a most respectable man, and a friend both of Milton’s and Marvell’s, and not at all likely either to cheat the public with a falsely signed certificate, or to be cheated by a London lodging-house keeper. Whatever “Mary Marvell” may have been, “widow, wife, or maid,” she is heard of no more.
Hull was not wholly unmindful of her late and (William Wilberforce notwithstanding) her most famous member. “On Thursday the 26th of September 1678, in consideration of the kindness the Town and Borough had for Andrew Marvell, Esq., one of the Burgesses of Parliament for the same Borough (lately deceased), and for his great merits from the Corporation. It is this day ordered by the Court that Fifty pounds be paid out of the Town’s Chest towards the discharge of his funerals (sic), and to perpetuate his memory by a gravestone” (Bench Books of Hull).
The incumbent of Trinity Church is said to have objected to the erection of any monument. At all events there is none. Marvell had many enemies in the Church. Sharp, afterwards Archbishop of York, was a Yorkshire man, and had been domestic chaplain to Sir Heneage Finch, a lawyer-member, much lashed by Marvell’s bitter pen. Sharp had also taken part in the quarrel with the Dissenters, and is reported to have been very much opposed to any Hull monument to Marvell. Captain Thompson says “the Epitaph which the Town of Hull caused to be erected to Marvell’s memory was torn down by the Zealots of the King’s party.” There is no record of this occurrence.
There are several portraits of Marvell in existence—one now being in the National Portrait Gallery. A modern statue in marble adorns the Town Hall of Hull.
211:1 In reading the early volumes of the Parliamentary History the question has to be asked, What authority is there for the reports of speeches? In Charles the Second’s time some of the speakers, both in the Lords and Commons, evidently communicated their orations to the press.
215:1 Lord Mayor, 1667.
220:1 See Marvell’s Ghost, in Poems on Affairs of State.
223:1 The cottage at Highgate, long called ‘Marvell’s Cottage,’ has now disappeared. Several of Marvell’s letters were written from Highgate.
CHAPTER VIII
WORK AS A MAN OF LETTERS
Marvell’s work as a man of letters easily divides itself into the inevitable three parts. First, as a poet properly so called; Second, as a political satirist using rhyme; and Third, as a writer of prose.
Upon Marvell’s work as a poet properly so called that curious, floating, ever-changing population to whom it is convenient to refer as “the reading public,” had no opportunity of forming any real opinion until after the poet’s death, namely, when the small folio of 1681 made its appearance. This volume, although not containing the Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland or the lines upon Cromwell’s death, did contain, saving these exceptions, all the best of Marvell’s verse.
How this poetry was received, to whom and to how many it gave pleasure, we have not the means of knowing. The book, like all other good books, had to take its chance. Good poetry is never exactly unpopular—its difficulty is to get a hearing, to secure a vogue. I feel certain that from 1681 onwards many ingenuous souls read Eyes and Tears, The Bermudas, The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn, To his Coy Mistress, Young Love, and The Garden with pure delight. In 1699 the poet Pomfret, of whose Choice Dr. Johnson said in 1780, “perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused,” and who Southey in 1807 declared to be “the most popular of English poets”; in 1699, I say, this poet Pomfret says in a preface, sensibly enough, “to please everyone would be a New Thing, and to write so as to please no Body would be as New, for even Quarles and Wythers (sic) have their Admirers.” So liable is the public taste to fluctuations and reversals, that to-day, though Quarles and Wither are not popular authors, they certainly number many more readers than Pomfret, Southey’s “most popular of English poets,” who has now, it is to be feared, finally disappeared even from the Anthologies. But if Quarles and Wither had their admirers even in 1699, the poet Marvell, we may be sure, had his also.
Marvell had many poetical contemporaries—five-and-twenty at least—poets of mark and interest, to most of whom, as well as to some of his immediate predecessors, he stood, as I must suppose, in some degree of poetical relationship. With Milton and Dryden no comparison will suggest itself, but with Donne and Cowley, with Waller and Denham, with Butler and the now wellnigh forgotten Cleveland, with Walker and Charles Cotton, with Rochester and Dorset, some resemblances, certain influences, may be found and traced. From the order of his mind and his prose style, I should judge Marvell to have been both a reader and a critic of his contemporaries in verse and prose—though of his criticisms little remains. Of Butler he twice speaks with great respect, and his sole reference to the dead Cleveland is kindly. Of Milton we know what he thought, whilst Aubrey tells us that he once heard Marvell say that the Earl of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true vein of satire.
Be these influences what they may or must have been, to us Marvell occupies, as a poet, a niche by himself. A finished master of his art he never was. He could not write verses like his friend Lovelace, or like Cowley’s Chronicle or Waller’s lines “On a Girdle.” He had not the inexhaustible, astonishing (though tiresome) wit of Butler. He is often clumsy and sometimes almost babyish. One has frequently occasion to wonder how a man of business could allow himself to be tickled by such obvious straws as are too many of the conceits which give him pleasure. To attribute all the conceits of this period to the influence of Dr. Donne is but a poor excuse after all. The worst thing that can be said against poetry is that there is so much tedium in it. The glorious moments are all too few. It is his honest recognition of this woeful fact that makes Dr. Johnson, with all his faults lying thick about him, the most consolatory of our critics to the ordinary reading man. “Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults.... Unhappily this pernicious failure is that which an author is least able to discover. We are seldom tiresome to ourselves.... Perhaps no man ever thought a line superfluous when he wrote it” (Lives of the Poets. Under Prior—see also under Butler).
That Marvell is never tiresome I will not assert. But he too has his glorious moments, and they are all his own. In the whole compass of our poetry there is nothing quite like Marvell’s love of gardens and woods, of meads and rivers and birds. It is a love not learnt from books, not borrowed from brother-poets. It is not indulged in to prove anything. It is all sheer enjoyment.
Curb me about, ye gadding vines,
And oh, so close your circles lace,
That I may never leave this place!
But, lest your fetters prove too weak,
Ere I your silken bondage break,
Do you, O brambles, chain me too,
And, courteous briars, nail me through.
...
Here at the fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the body’s vest aside,
My soul into the boughs does glide;
There, like a bird, it sits and sings.”
No poet is happier than Marvell in creating the impression that he made his verses out of doors.
He heard the woodcock’s evening hymn;
He found the tawny thrush’s broods,
And the shy hawk did wait for him.
What others did at distance hear
And guessed within the thicket’s gloom
Was shown to this philosopher,
And at his bidding seemed to come.”
(From Emerson’s Wood Notes.)
Marvell’s immediate fame as a true poet was, I dare say, obscured for a good while both by its original note (for originality is always forbidding at first sight) and by its author’s fame as a satirist, and his reputation as a lover of “liberty’s glorious feast.” It was as one of the poets encountered in the Poems on Affairs of State (fifth edition, 1703) that Marvell was best known during the greater part of the eighteenth century. As Milton’s friend Marvell had, as it were, a side-chapel in the great Miltonic temple. The patriotic member of Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby’s proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell’s name was on the list of its professors. Wordsworth’s sonnet has preserved this tradition for us.
And tongues that utter’d wisdom, better none:
The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington.”
In 1726 Thomas Cooke printed an edition of Marvell’s works which contains the poetry that was in the folio of 1681, and in 1772 Cooke’s edition was reprinted by T. Davies. It was probably Davies’s edition that Charles Lamb, writing to Godwin on Sunday, 14th December 1800, says he “was just going to possess”: a notable addition to Lamb’s library, and an event in the history of the progress of Marvell’s poetical reputation. Captain Thompson’s edition, containing the Horatian Ode and other pieces, followed in 1776. In the great Poetical Collection of the Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly1 called “Johnson’s Poets” (improperly, because the poets were, with four exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers, anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place. Mr. George Ellis, in his Specimens of the early English poets first published in 1803, printed from Marvell Daphne and Chloe (in part) and Young Love. When Mr. Bowles, that once famous sonneteer, edited Pope in 1806, he, by way of belittling Pope, quoted two lines from Marvell, now well known, but unfamiliar in 1806:—
The hatching throstle’s shining eye.”
He remarked upon them, “the last circumstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been described by one who was a real lover of nature and a witness of her beauties in her most solitary retirement.” On this Mark Pattison makes the comment that the lines only prove that Marvell when a boy went bird-nesting (Essays, vol. ii. p. 374), a pursuit denied to Pope by his manifold infirmities. The poet Campbell, in his Specimens (1819), gave an excellent sketch of Marvell’s life, and selected The Bermudas, The Nymph and Fawn, and Young Love. Then came, fresh from talk with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, with his Select Poets (1825), which contains the Horatian Ode, Bermudas, To his Coy Mistress, The Nymph and Fawn, A Drop of Dew, The Garden, The Gallery, Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow. In this choice we may see the hand of Charles Lamb, as Tennyson’s may be noticed in the selection made in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1863). Dean Trench in his Household Book of English Poetry (1869) gives Eyes and Tears, the Horatian Ode, and A Drop of Dew. In Mr. Ward’s English Poets (1880) Marvell is represented by The Garden, A Drop of Dew, The Bermudas, Young Love, the Horatian Ode, and the Lines on Paradise Lost. Thanks to these later Anthologies and to the quotations from The Garden and Upon Appleton House in the Essays of Elia, Marvell’s fame as a true poet has of recent years become widespread, and is now, whatever vicissitudes it may have endured, well established.
As a satirist in rhyme Marvell has shared the usual and not undeserved fate of almost all satirists of their age and fellow-men. The authors of lines written in heat to give expression to the anger of the hour may well be content if their effusions give the pain or teach the lesson they were intended to give or teach. If you lash the age, you do so presumably for the benefit of the age. It is very hard to transmit even a fierce and genuine indignation from one age to another. Marvell’s satires were too hastily composed, too roughly constructed, too redolent of the occasion, to enter into the kingdom of poetry. To the careful and character-loving reader of history, particularly if he chance to have a feeling for the House of Commons, not merely as an institution, but as a place of resort, Marvell’s satirical poems must always be intensely interesting. They strike me as honest in their main intention, and never very wide of the mark. Hallam says, in his lofty way, “We read with nothing but disgust the satirical poetry of Cleveland, Butler, Oldham, Marvell,” and he adds, “Marvell’s satires are gross and stupid.”1 Gross they certainly occasionally are, but stupid they never are. Marvell was far too well-informed a politician and too shrewd a man ever to be stupid.
As a satirist Marvell had, if he wanted them, many models of style, but he really needed none, for he just wrote down in rough-and-ready rhyme whatever his head or his spleen suggested to his fancy. Every now and again there is a noble outburst of feeling, and a couplet of great felicity. I confess to taking great pleasure in Marvell’s satires.
As a prose writer Marvell has many merits and one great fault. He has fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler’s Hudibras by heart, but was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell’s prose. His great fault is a very common one. He is too long. He forgets how quickly a reader grows tired. He is so interested in the evolutions of his own mind that he forgets his audience. His interest at times seems as if it were going to prove endless. It is the first business of an author to arrest and then to retain the attention of the reader. To do this requires great artifice.
Among the masters of English prose it would be rash to rank Marvell, who was neither a Hooker nor a Taylor. None the less he was the owner of a prose style which some people think the best prose style of all—that of honest men who have something to say.