Symmons (1806). Fletcher (1833), Mitford (1851), and St John (Bohn, 4 vols. 1848-53). Macaulay's criticism in the Essays is characteristically brilliant. In 1690-94 Hog (Hogæus) rendered most of Milton's poems into Latin; and there are Latin versions of Paradise Lost by Joseph Trapp (1741) and William Dobson (1750). The English translation of the first Defensio usually cited is that by Joseph Washington (about 1690); of the second, that by Dr Fellowes (1806); and there is another by Archdeacon Wrangham (1816). G. Jenny has written an interesting book (1890) on the influence of Milton on German literature in the eighteenth century. The portrait given on page 687, less familiar than those from the engravings by Faithorne, is from the painting by the Dutch painter Van der Plaas (1647-1704), now in the National Portrait Gallery.

Andrew Marvell was born in the village of Winestead, in the south-east angle of Yorkshire, on 31st March 1621. His father, also Andrew Marvell (c. 1586-1641), was rector of Winestead, which living he resigned in 1624 for the mastership of Hull grammar-school. A romantic story is told of the circumstances attending the elder Marvell's death. A young lady from the opposite side of the Humber had visited him on the occasion of the baptism of one of his children. She was to return next day, and though the weather proved tempestuous, insisted on fulfilling the promise she had made to her mother. Mr Marvell accompanied her; but having a presentiment of danger, he threw his cane ashore from the boat, saying to the spectators that in case he should perish the cane was to be given to his son, with the injunction that he should remember his father. His fears were but too truly verified; the boat went down in the storm, and the party perished. The mother of the young lady, it is added, provided for the orphan son of the drowned minister, and at her death left him her fortune. Young Marvell studied in 1633-41 at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then travelled for four years in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain. A letter from Milton to Secretary Bradshaw was in 1823 discovered in the State-Paper Office, in which the poet recommends Marvell as a person well fitted to assist himself in his office of Latin secretary, he being a good scholar and lately engaged by Lord Fairfax to give some instruction in the languages to his daughter. The letter is dated 21st February 1653. Marvell, however, was not engaged as Milton's assistant till 1657; meanwhile he was tutor at Eton to a ward of Cromwell's, and there got to know John Hales. In January 1659 he took his seat in Richard Cromwell's Parliament as member for Hull. He was not, like Waller, an eloquent speaker, but his consistency and integrity made him highly esteemed and respected. He maintained a close correspondence with his constituents, and his letters fill four hundred printed pages. His constituents, in return, occasionally sent him a stout cask of ale; and he was one of the last paid members, receiving in session 6s. 8d. per diem. In 1663-65 he went as a secretary of embassy to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. Charles II. delighted in his society, and believing, like Sir Robert Walpole, that every man had his price, he sent Lord Danby, his treasurer, to wait upon Marvell, with an offer of a place at court and

an immediate present of a thousand pounds. The inflexible member resisted his offers, and it is said humorously illustrated his independence by calling his servant to witness that he had dined for three days successively on a shoulder of mutton. The story adds-but the whole seems highly improbable -that when the treasurer was gone Marvell was forced to send to a friend to borrow a guinea. The patriot preserved his integrity to the last, and satirised the profligacy and arbitrary measures of the court with much wit and pungency. He died 18th August 1678, at the time of the Popish Plot, not without suspicion of poison, but really the victim of a tertian ague, unskilfully treated by an ignorant, obstinate doctor. The town of Hull voted

£50 to erect a monument to Marvell's memory, but the court interfered and forbade the votive tribute.

Marvell's prose writings were exceedingly popular in their day, but, written for temporary purposes, they have mostly gone out of date with the events that produced them. In 1672-73 he attacked Dr (afterwards Bishop) Parker in a piece entitled The Rehearsal Transprosed, in which he vindicates the fair fame of Milton, who, he says, 'was and is a man of as great learning and sharpness of wit as any man.' This controversy has won him a part as interlocutor in one of the most vigorous of Landor's Imaginary Conversations, where he is made to slay the Bishop over again, and to say far finer things about Milton than he had said in his own works. One of Marvell's treatises, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), was considered so formidable that a reward was offered for the dis

A

covery of the author and printer. As in the case of Milton and other Puritans, the energy and independence of Marvell in theological controversy verged upon freethinking and rationalism. Short Historical Essay concerning General Councils, appended to one of his controversial tracts, is so free in its criticism of the mode of securing agreement at the Council of Nice that it looks very like a polemic against the dogmas there formulated and so forced on the Christian Church. And one is not surprised to find that this essay was republished in the interests of the eighteenth-century Deists. Ample evidence of that vein of sportive humour and raillery on national manners and absurdities, afterwards so effectively employed by Addison, Steele, Arbuthnot, and Swift, may be found in Marvell. He wrote with great liveliness, point, and vigour, though he was often coarse and personal. His poetry was, in his own time, an embellishment to his character of patriot and controversialist rather than a substantive ground of honour and distinction; yet even Sainte- Beuve (whose attention was called to him by Matthew Arnold) greeted in him a worthy though not co-equal rival of Milton, a more martial and less purely Christian champion of the same Christian and patriotic English renaissance. Only a lovable man could have written his verses on The Emigrants in the Bermudas. His poem on The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn is a triumph of grace and pathos. 'Music the mosaic of the air,' from his Music's Empire, illustrates a tendency to occasional conceits; 'Only human eyes can weep,' from Eyes and Tears, shows suggestive (if not strictly accurate) observation and phrasing. A different aspect of his genius, recalling the frank and half-pagan sensuousness of another party and an earlier age than his own, is seen in the lines To his Coy Mistress, and in those entitled The Garden. The former, perhaps his very finest verses, are too much like some of Donne's warmer amoretti for quotation in full; yet this specimen of them must at least be quoted :

But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

The luscious stanzas on The Garden-a superior English rendering of a Latin exercise of Marvell's own-are not extravagantly praised by Palgrave as ' a test of any reader's insight into the most poetical aspects of poetry,' although the affinity which they display is not so much with Shelley's airy raptures as with the luxuriant fancies of Keats.

The Emigrants in the Bermudas.
Where the remote Bermudas ride
In the ocean's bosom unespied,
From a small boat that rowed along,
The listening winds received this song:
'What should we do but sing his praise
That led us through the watery maze

Unto an isle so long unknowa,
And yet far kinder than our own?
Where he the huge sea-monsters wracks,
That lift the deep upon their backs;
He lands us on a grassy stage,
Safe from the storms and prelates' rage.
He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything,
And sends the fowls to us in care,
On daily visits thro' the air.
He hangs in shades the orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night,
And does in the pomegranates close
Jewels more rich than Ormus shews.
He makes the figs our mouths to meet,
And throws the melons at our feet.
But apples, plants of such a price,
No tree could ever bear them twice!
With cedars chosen by his hand

From Lebanon he stores the land;
And makes the hollow seas that roar,
Proclaim the ambergrease on shore.
He cast (of which we rather boast)
The Gospel's pearl upon our coast;
And in these rocks for us did frame
A temple where to sound his name.
O let our voice his praise exalt,
Till it arrive at heaven's vault,
Which then perhaps rebounding may
Echo beyond the Mexique bay.'
Thus sang they in the English boat
An holy and a chearful note,
And all the way, to guide their chime,
With falling oars they kept the time.

The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn.

The wanton troopers riding by

Have shot my fawn, and it will die.
Ungentle men! They cannot thrive
Who killed thee. Thou ne'er didst, alive,
Them any harm; alas ! nor could
Thy death yet do them any good.
I'm sure I never wished them ill,
Nor do I for all this, nor will :
But, if my simple prayers may yet
Prevail with Heaven to forget
Thy murder, I will join my tears
Rather than fail. But O my fears!
It cannot die so. Heaven's King

Keeps register of every thing,
And nothing may we use in vain ;
Even beasts must be with justice slain ;
Else men are made their deodands.
Though they should wash their guilty hands
In this warm life-blood, which doth part
From thine, and wound me to the heart,
Yet could they not be clean; their stain
Is dyed in such a purple grain.
There is not such another in
The world to offer for their sin.

Inconstant Sylvio, when yet

I had not found him counterfeit, One morning, I remember well, Tied in this silver chain and bell,

Gave it to me: nay, and I know What he said then, I'm sure I do.

Said he 'Look how your huntsman here
Hath taught a fawn to hunt his deer.'
But Sylvio soon had me beguiled:
This waxed tame, while he grew wild,
And quite regardless of my smart,
Left me his fawn, but took his heart.

Thenceforth I set myself to play
My solitary time away
With this; and very well content
Could so mine idle life have spent ;
For it was full of sport, and light
Of foot and heart, and did invite
Me to its game: it seemed to bless
Itself in me; how could I less
Than love it? Oh, I cannot be
Unkind to a beast that loveth me!
Had it lived long, I do not know
Whether it too might have done so
As Sylvio did; his gifts might be
Perhaps as false, or more, than he.
But I am sure, for aught that I
Could in so short a time espy,
Thy love was far more better than
The love of false and cruel man.

With sweetest milk and sugar first
I it at mine own fingers nursed;
And as it grew so every day,

It waxed more white and sweet than they.
It had so sweet a breath! and oft

I blushed to see its foot more soft,

And white, shall I say than my hand?
Nay, any lady's of the land!

It was a wondrous thing how fleet
'Twas on those little silver feet.
With what a pretty skipping grace
It oft would challenge me the race;
And when't had left me far away,
'Twould stay, and run again, and stay;
For it was nimbler much than hinds,
And trod as if on the four winds.

I have a garden of my own,
But so with roses overgrown,
And lilies, that you would it guess
To be a little wilderness;

And all the spring-time of the year
It only loved to be there.
Among the beds of lilies I

Have sought it oft, where it should lie;
Yet could not, till itself would rise,
Find it, although before mine eyes;
For in the flaxen lilies' shade,

It like a bank of lilies laid.
Upon the roses it would feed,
Until its lips even seemed to bleed;
And then to me 'twould boldly trip,
And print those roses on my lip.
But all its chief delight was still
On roses thus itself to fill;
And its pure virgin limbs to fold
In whitest sheets of lilies cold.

Had it lived long, it would have been
Lilies without, roses within.

O help! O help! I see it faint
And die as calmly as a saint!

See how it weeps! The tears do come
Sad, slowly, dropping like a gum.
So weeps the wounded balsam; so
The holy frankincense doth flow; ;
The brotherless Heliades

Melt in such amber tears as these.

From A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness, the Lord Protector.'

He without noise still travelled to his end,

As silent suns to meet the night descend;
The stars that for him fought had only power
Left to determine now his fatal hour,
Which, since they might not hinder, yet they cast
To choose it worthy of his glories past.
No part of time but bare his mark away
Of honour-all the year was Cromwell s day!
But this of all the most auspicious found,
Twice had in open field him victor crowned,
When up the armed mountains of Dunbar

He marched, and through deep Severn, ending war:
What day should him eternize but the same
That had before immortalized his name?
That so whoe'er would at his death have joyed

In their own griefs might find themselves employed,
But those that sadly his departure grieved,
Yet joyed, remembering what he once achieved.
And the last minute his victorious ghost
Gave chase to Ligny on the Belgic coast:
Here ended all his mortal toils; he laid
And slept in peace under the laurel shade.

I saw him dead: a leaden slumber lies,
And mortal sleep, over those wakeful eyes;
Those gentle rays under the lids were fled,
Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed;
That port, which so majestic was and strong,
Loose, and deprived of vigour, stretched along;
All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan,
How much another thing, no more that man!
O human glory vain! O death! O wings!
O worthless world! O transitory things!
Yet dwelt that greatness in his shape decayed,
That still, though dead, greater than death, he laid,
And in his altered face you something feign
That threatens Death he yet will live again!

The Character of Holland.

[A satire on Holland as supporting the cause of the pretender Charles II., then an exile there.]

;

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,
As but the off-scouring of the British sand,
And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heaved the lead
Or what by the ocean's slow alluvion fell,
Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell;
This indigested vomit of the sea
Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Glad then, as miners who have found the ore,
They, with mad labour, fished the land to shore :
And dived as desperately for each piece
Of earth as if 't had been of ambergreese;
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away;

Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll,
Transfusing into them their dunghill 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;
Building their watery Babel far more high
To reach the sea, than those to scale the sky.
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 shew them what's their mare liberum.
A daily deluge over them does boil;
The earth and water play at level-coil.1
The fish ofttimes the burgher dispossessed,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest;
And oft the Tritons and the sea-nymphs saw
Whole shoals of Dutch served up for cabillau ;2
Or, as they over the new level ranged,
For pickled herring, pickled heeren3 changed.
Nature, it seemed, ashamed of her mistake,
Would throw their land away at duck and drake,
Therefore necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings;
For, as with Pigmies, who best kills the crane,
Among the hungry he that treasures grain,
Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns,
So rules among the drowned he that drains.
Not who first see the rising sun commands,
But who could first discern the rising lands.
Who best could know to pump an earth so 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 dike-grave unperceived invades
The power, and grows, as 'twere, a king of spades;
But, for less envy, some joined states endures,
Who look like a commission of the sewers :
For these Half-anders, half-wet, and half-dry,
Nor bear strict service, nor pure liberty.

5

'Tis probable religion, after this,

Came next in order; which they could not miss.
How could the Dutch but be converted, when
The Apostles were so many fishermen ?
Besides, the waters of themselves did rise,
And, as their land, so them did re-baptise.

1 A game otherwise called 'hitch-buttock.' 2 Kabeljauw is Dutch for 'cod-fish.' 3 Heeren is Dutch for men,' 'gentlemen.' Earl of a dike. 5 A pun on Hollanders, as Whole-anders.

A Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from

Ireland.

The forward youth that would appear,
Must now forsake his muses dear,

Nor in the shadows sing

His numbers languishing :

'Tis time to leave the books in dust, And oil the unused armour's rust, Removing from the wall

The corselet of the hall.

So restless Cromwell could not cease
In the inglorious arts of peace,

But through adventurous war
Urged his active star;

And, like the three-forked lightning, first
Breaking the clouds where it was nurst,

Did thorough his own side
His fiery way divide;
(For 'tis all one to courage high,
The emulous, or enemy,

And with such to inclose

Is more than to oppose ;) Then burning through the air he went, And palaces and temples rent;

And Cæsar's head at last

Did through his laurels blast.
'Tis madness to resist or blame
The force of angry heaven's flame ;
And if we would speak true,
Much to the man is due
Who from his private gardens, where
He lived reserved and austere,
As if his highest plot

To plant the bergamot,
Could by industrious valour climb
To ruin the great work of Time,
And cast the kingdoms old,
Into another mould.
Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain,
(But those do hold or break,

As men are strong or weak),
Nature, that hateth emptiness,
Allows of penetration less,

And therefore must make room
Where greater spirits come.

What field of all the civil war,
Where his were not the deepest scar?
And Hampton shows what part
He had of wiser art;

Where, twining subtile fears with hope,
He wove a net of such a scope

That Charles himself might chase To Carisbrook's narrow case, That thence the royal actor borne, The tragic scaffold might adorn,

While round the armed bands, Did clap their bloody hands : He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene,

But with his keener eye

The axe's edge did try ;
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,

But bowed his comely head
Down, as upon a bed.

This was that memorable hour,
Which first assured the forced power;
So when they did design
The capitol's first line,

A bleeding head, where they begun,
Did fright the architects to run ;

And yet in that the state
Foresaw its happy fate.

And now the Irish are ashamed
To see themselves in one year tamed :
So much one man can do,
That does both act and know.
They can affirm his praises best,
And have, though overcome, confessed
How good he is, how just,
And fit for highest trust.

Nor yet grown stiffer with command,

But still in the republic's hand,

(How fit he is to sway,

That can so well obey!) He to the Commons' feet presents A kingdom for his first year's rents; And, what he may, forbears His fame, to make it theirs ; And has his sword and spoils ungirt, To lay them at the public's skirt : So when the falcon high

Falls heavy from the sky,

She, having killed, no more doth search,
But on the next green bough to perch ;
Where, when he first does lure,
The falconer has her sure.
What may not then our isle presume,
While victory his crest does plume?

What may not others fear,
If thus he crowns each year?
As Cæsar he ere long to Gaul,
To Italy a Hannibal,

And to all states not free,
Shall climacteric be.

The Pict no shelter now shall find
Within his party-coloured mind,

But from this valour sad,
Shrink underneath the plaid;
Happy if in the tufted brake,
The English hunter him mistake,

Nor lay his hounds in near
The Caledonian deer.

But thou, the war's and fortune's son
March indefatigably on,

And for the last effect,
Still keep the sword erect;
Beside the force it has to fright
The spirits of the shady night,

The same arts that did gain
A power, must it maintain.

Marvell's Poems were printed in folio in 1681 with a preface by his widow, and again by Cooke in 1726. Captain E. Thompson edited his Works (3 vols. 1776); but the only complete and accurate edition is that of Dr A. B. Grosart (4 vols. 1872-74). There is an admirable selection by G. A. Aitken (1892).

Algernon Sidney (1622-82), son of the Earl of Leicester, was carefully educated, accompanied his father to Denmark and France, and when his father was Lord Deputy of Ireland, commanded a troop of horse against the Irish rebels. In 1643, during the Civil War, Sidney was permitted to return to England, where he immediately joined the parliamentary forces, and, as colonel of a regiment of horse, was present at several engagements. He was likewise successively governor of Chichester, Dublin, and Dover. In 1648 he was named a member of the court for trying the king, which, however, he did not attend, though not from any disapproval of the intentions of those who composed it. The usurpation of Cromwell gave offence to Sidney, who declined to accept office either under the Protector or his son Richard; but when the Long Parliament recovered power, he readily consented to act as one of the Council of State. At the time of

the Restoration he was engaged on an embassy to Denmark and Sweden; and, apprehensive of the vengeance of the royalists, he remained abroad for seventeen years, flitting from place to place -Venice, Rome, Brussels, Augsburg. After his return to England by the king's permission in 1677, he opposed the measures of the court, a course which Hume and others held to be ungrateful to the king. A more serious charge was first presented in Dalrymple's Memoirs of Great Britain, published in 1773. The English patriots, with Lord William Russell at their head, intrigued with Barillon, the French ambassador, to prevent war between France and England, their purpose being to preclude Charles II. from having the command of the large funds which on such an occasion must have been entrusted to him, and which he might have used against the liberties of the nation; while Louis was not less anxious to prevent the English from joining the list of his enemies. The association was a strange one; but it never would have been held as a moral stain upon the patriots if Sir John Dalrymple had not discovered amongst Barillon's papers one containing a list of persons receiving bribes from the French monarch, amongst whom appears the name of Sidney, together with those of several other leading Whig members of Parliament. Lord Russell was not of the number, but that Sidney stooped to receive the money is admitted by Hallam, Macaulay, and Firth (though disputed by Ewald)-doubtless for public and not personal But it is evident, as Lord Macaulay argued, that national feeling in England was at a low ebb when Charles II. was willing to become the deputy of France, and a man like Algernon Sidney would have been content to see England reduced to the condition of a French province in the wild hope that a foreign despot would assist him to establish his darling republic. It should be remembered that Sidney was as openly hostile to William of Orange as to Charles. He took a conspicuous part in the proceedings by which the Whigs endeavoured to exclude the Duke of York from the throne; and when that attempt failed, he seems to have joined in the conspiracy for an insurrection to accomplish the same object. This was exposed in consequence of the detection of an inferior plot for the assassination of the king, in which the patriots Russell, Sidney, and others were dexterously inculpated by the court. Sidney was tried for high treason before the infamous Chief-Justice Jeffreys. Although the only witness against him was an abandoned character, Lord Howard, and nothing could be produced that even ostensibly strengthened the evidence, except some manuscripts in which the lawfulness of resisting tyrants was asserted, the right of deposing kings maintained, and a preference given to a free over an arbitrary government, the jury were servile enough to obey the directions of the judge and pronounce him guilty. Sidney was

uses.