and pragmaticalness, it quite overrun the whole Reformation." (The bramble, of course, is Calvin.) "You must conceive that Mr. Bayes was all this while in an extacy, in Dodona's grove; or else here is strange work-worse than 'explicating a post,' or 'examining a pillar.' A 'bramble' that had agents abroad, and itself 'an indefatigable bramble.' But straight our bramble is transformed into a man, and he 'makes a chair of infallibility for himself' out of his own bramble timber."

The account of Parker's rise and progress as a chaplain and a popular preacher is rather personal, and too long to be extracted; but there are some things in it which deserve to be remarked for their universal application: e. g. "Having soon wrought himself dexterously into his patron's favour by short graces and short sermons, and a mimical way of drolling upon the Puritans; he gained a great authority likewise among the domestics: they listened to him as an oracle, and they allowed him, by common consent, to have not only all the divinity, but more wit too, than all the rest of the family put together." The short graces and sermons, all candidates for preferment will do well to imitate; but mimical ways should cautiously be avoided. But this is still better:-" Being of an amorous complexion, and finding himself the cock-divine and the cock-wit of the family, he took the privilege to walk among the hens; and thought it not impolitic to establish his new-acquired reputation upon the gentlewomen's side: and they that perceived he was a rising man, and of pleasant conversation, dividing his day among them into canonical hours,―of reading, now, the common-prayer, and now the romances,—were very much taken with him. The sympathy of silk began to stir and attract the tippet to the petticoat, and the petticoat to the tippet. The innocent ladies found a strange unquietness in their minds, and could not distinguish whether it were love or devotion. I do not hear that for all this he had practised upon the honour of the ladies, but that he preserved always the civility of a Platonic knight-errant. For all this, courtship had no other operation but to make him still more in love with himself; and if he frequented their company, it was only to speculate his own baby in their eyes."

*

*

There are some who could not do better than attend to the following: "He is the first minister of the Gospel that ever had it in his commission to rail at all nations. And though it hath long been practised, I never observed any great success by reviling men into conformity. I have heard that charms may even invite the moon out of Heaven, but I could never see her moved by the rhetoric of barking."

But we must make an end of our extracts, (though we could willingly

G

extend them further,) with a few of those curious thoughts, which constitute the resemblance we have asserted to exist between Marvell and Butler.

Page 57. "This is an admirable dexterity our author has, to correct a man's scribbling humours without impairing his reputation. He is as courteous as the lightning, which can melt the sword without ever hurting the scabbard."

61. "Is it not strange, that in those most benign minutes of a man's life, when the stars smile, the birds sing, the winds whisper, the fountains warble, the trees blossom, and universal nature seems to invite itself to the bridal, when the lion pulls in his claws, and the aspic lays by its poison, and all the most noxious creatures grow amorously innocent: that even then, Mr. Bayes alone should not be able to refrain his malignity. As you love yourself, Madam, let him not come near you; he hath all his life been fed with vipers instead of lampreys, and scorpions for cray-fish; and if any time he eat chickens they had been crammed with spiders, till he hath envenomed his whole substance, that it is much safer to bed with a mountebank before he hath taken his antidote."*

140. "Bayes had at first built up such a stupendous magistrate as never was of God's making. He had put all Princes on the rack to stretch them to his dimension. And as a straight line continued grows a circle, he had given them so infinite a power, that it was extended into impotency. For although he found it not till it was too late in the cause, yet he felt it all along (which is the understanding of brutes,) in the effect."

187. "For I do not think it will excuse a witch to say that she conjured up a spirit merely that she might lay him, nor can there be a more dexterous and malicious way of calumny, than by making a needless apology for another in a criminal subject. As suppose I should write a preface shewing what grounds there are of fears and jealousies of Bayes's being an atheist."

The germ of this thought, which is borrowed from the fanciful physics of an age when Shaftesbury consulted astrologers, Dryden cast nativities, and Buckingham sought for the philosopher's stone, is to be found in Hudibras :

The Prince of Cambay's daily food

Is Asp, and Basilisk, and Toad,

Which makes him have so strong a breath

Each night he stinks a Queen to death.

Marvell was manifestly much addicted to light reading; a proof that he did not sympathize with the sour, imagination-killing austerities of those separatists, whose cause he fought so ably, when it was become the cause of conscience and liberty. His allusions to romances, plays, and poems, are very numerous and apposite. This taste is often observable in men of business, statesmen, and philosophers.

Though our quotations have already extended too far, we cannot leave behind the following passage, because it states the just principles of the patriot in the clearest point of view. Speaking of Laud's unhappy attempt to force a form of worship upon the Scotch, and the consequent insurrection, he says, "Whether it be a war of religion or of liberty, is not worth the labour to enquire. Whichsoever was at the top, the other was at the bottom; but considering all, I think the cause was too good to be fought for. Men ought to have trusted God; they ought and might have trusted the King with the whole of that The arms of the church are prayers and tears, the arms of the subject are patience and petitions. The King himself being of so accurate and piercing a judgment would soon have felt where it stuck. For men may spare their pains when nature is at work, and the world will not go the faster for our driving. Even as his present Majesty's happy restoration did itself, so all things else happen in their best and proper time, without our officiousness."

matter.

Such an attack may naturally be supposed to have called forth a host of answers, some of which attempted to vie with the quaintness of Marvell's title.

As Marvell had nicknamed Parker Bayes, the quaint humour of one entitled his reply "Rosemary and Bayes;" another, "The Transproser Rehearsed, or the Fifth Act of Mr. Bayes's Play ;" another, "Gregory Father Greybeard with his Vizard off." "There were no less than six scaramouches together upon the stage, all of them of the same gravity and behaviour, the same tone, and the same habit, that it was impossible to discern which was the true author of The Ecclesiastical Polity.' I believe he imitated the wisdom of some other Princes, who have sometimes been persuaded by their servants to disguise several others in the regal garb, that the enemy might not know in the battle whom to single."

Parker certainly did answer, or attempt to answer, his adversary, in "A reproof of the Rehearsal Transprosed," in which he hints the propriety of Marvell's receiving a practical reproof from the secular arm. About the same time Andrew found in his lodgings an anonymous epistle, short as a blunderbuss :-"If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr. Parker, by the eternal God, I will cut thy throat," which pious expressions of High-church zeal was adopted as the motto to the "Second part of the Rehearsal Transprosed," printed in 1673. From this second part we must be content with a single extract. Parker had reproached Marvell with the friendship of Milton, then living, in terms calculated to draw fresh suspicion on the aged poet, in an age when many would have deemed it a service to the church, if not to God, to

assassinate the author of Paradise Lost. Of his great and venerable friend, Marvell speaks thus honourably :

"J. M. was, and is, a man of great learning and sharpness of wit as any man. It was his misfortune, living in a tumultuous time, to be tossed on the wrong side, and he writ, flagrante Bello, certain dangerous treatises of no other nature than that which I mentioned to you writ by your own father,* only with this difference, that your father's, which I have by me, was written with the same design, but with much less wit or judgment. At his Majesty's happy return, J. M. did partake, even as you yourself did, of his regal clemency, and has ever since lived in a most retired silence. It was after that, I well remember it, that being one day at his house, I there first met you accidentally. But there it was, when you, as I told you, wandered up and down Moorfields, astrologizing on the duration of his Majesty's government, that you frequented J. M. incessantly, and haunted his house day by day. What discourses you there used he is too generous to remember."

Perhaps it was well for Marvell, that Milton could not read this, and we hope no one was so injudicious as to read it to him, for he would most angrily have spurned at anything like an extenuation of deeds in which he never ceased to glory. The very constitution of Milton's mind, his defect and his excellence, forbad him to conceive himself to have been in the wrong: in this, as in all else, but his genius and his nobility of soul, he was the very antipodes of Shakspeare. He that relented not, when he saw Charles the First upon the scaffold, was little likely to turn royalist, when he heard of Charles the Second in his haram.

Marvell, in all his authentic works, speaks with respect and tenderness of Charles the First, whose errors and misfortunes he attributed mainly to the rash counsels of the Prelates. In religion, he appears to incline to the Calvinistic doctrines, but without bitterness against the contrary opinions. He was truly liberal without indifference.

In October, 1674, his correspondence with his constituents was resumed, (or rather from this date it has been preserved,) and continued

Controversy is pitch; none can meddle with it and be clean. How little worthy of Marvell was it to reproach Parker with what his father had written; was it his fault that his father was one of Oliver's committee-men, or that he wrote a book in defence of "the government of the people of England," with a most hieroglyphical title of emblems, mottos, &c., enough, as Andrew says, to have supplied the mortlings and achievements of this godly family?

Parker died Bishop of Oxford, and it is asserted, on the very dubious credit of Jesuits, that he would have openly professed Popery under James the Second had he not been married. He died 1687, at the President's lodge of Maudlin College, Oxford. His versatility of principle does not seem to have enriched his family, for one of his daughters was reduced to the necessity of begging her bread.

to within a few months of his death. The first letter of this renewed series has been often quoted as an instance of his incorruptibility and caution. The people of Hull had thought fit to propitiate with a present their governor, the Duke of Monmouth, then highly popular, and the hero, if not head of a certain party, who, to avert the dangers of a catholic succession, would gladly have washed the stain of illegitimacy from Charles's favourite offspring, though neither the law nor the Church of England permitted this ex post facto legitimation. They manage these things better at Rome. However Monmouth was the man of the day, and Marvell was to officiate in offering to the Duke the good town's oblation. But let him tell his own story:—“ To-day I waited on him, and first presented him with your letter, which he read over very attentively, and then prayed me to assure you, that he would, upon all occasions, be most ready to give you the marks of his affection, and assist you in any affairs that you should recommend to him; with other words of civility to the same purpose. I then delivered him the six broad pieces, telling him I was deputed to blush on your behalfe for the meanness of the present, &c.; but he took me off, and said he thanked you for it, and accepted it as a token of your kindness. He had, before I came in, as I was told, considered what to do with the gold; but that I by all means prevented the offer, or I had been in danger of being reimbursed with it. I received the bill which was sent me on Mr. Nelehorpe; but the surplus of it exceeding much the expense I have been at on this occasion, I desire you to make use of it, and of me, upon any other opportunity."

As these letters relate wholly to the confused and unhappy politics of the time, and do not throw any new light on what is generally known, much less lead to the discovery of what is obscure, we shall make no further selections from them. We do, however, earnestly desire to see them republished in a convenient form, with whatever historical elucidation they may require to render them intelligible. It is right to mention that they testify favourably to the general accuracy of Hume, with whose account of the same transactions we have had occasion to compare them. The last date is June 6th, 1678, about two months before his death. He died, perhaps happily for his fame, before the explosion of the Popish plot.

In the latter years of his life Marvell frequently appeared as a political writer, and perhaps excited more animosity in that capacity, than by his firmness as a senator. In 1675 was seen the novel spectacle of a Bishop (and one who had been a confessor for his church) assailed by a plain priest, for over-toleration, and defended by a Calvinistic layman. Dr. Herbert Croft, Bishop of Hereford, had published a book called