Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/617

Rh M A R M A R 589 The assistant secretaryship opened the way to public life, and in 1658 Marvell was elected member for Kingston- upon-Hull in Richard Cromwell s parliament. From 1663 to 1665 he acted as secretary to Lord Carlisle s embassy to Muscovy, Sweden, and Denmark ; and this is the only official post he ever filled during the reign of Charles. With the exception of this and of shorter unexplained intervals of travel, Marvell was constant in his parliamentary attendance to the day of his death. He seldom spoke in the House, some five or six times in all, but his parliamentary influence is amply established by other evidence ; and his correspondence with his con stituents, from 1660 to 1678, forms a source of information all the more valuable because by a resolution passed at the Restoration the publication of the proceedings of the House without leave was forbidden. He made it a point of duty to write at each post that is, every two or three days both on local interests and on all matters of public interest. The discreet reserve of these letters, natural at a time when the post-office was a favourite source of information to the Government, contrasts curiously with the freedom of the few private letters which state opinions as well as facts. Marvell s constituents, in their turn, were not unmindful of their member. He makes frequent references to their presents, usually of Hull ale and of salmon, and he regularly drew from them the wages of a member, six and eightpence a day during session. During these years Marvell wrote a good deal of verse, chiefly satire, often very coarse, but always vigorous and full of an honest hatred at corruption. He chose verse merely as being the usual vehicle of satire, and cared little about form. &quot; He plucked a cudgell from the nearest hedgerow, careless if it became fuel after it had served his turn.&quot; It was very different with his prose satires. His peculiar talent was first displayed in the mock King s Speech, issued in 1675. This is written in a vein of genial banter, perhaps the greatest tribute to the influence which the bonhomie of Charles exercised even over such men as Marvell. But his tone soon changed, and The Groiuth of Popery and Arbitrary Power ; published in the year of his death, is a grave indictment of the conduct of ministers of the crown, and, by implication, of Charles himself, since the Restoration. So shrewdly did this strike the conscience of the king that a proclamation, of which Marvell takes laughing notice, offered a large reward for the discovery of the author. As a political pamphleteer Marvell holds a high place ; as a satirist he stands still higher. Tolerance in religion was his creed, and this creed had been lately attacked by a clergyman seeking promotion, Dr Parker, afterwards bishop of Oxford, who asserted in their most extravagant form the claims of the civil magistrate over the consciences of subjects in matters of external religion. Marvell s reply, The Rehearsal Transprosed, is a masterpiece of prolonged banter. It contains passages of lofty indignation, hearty laughter, coarse vituperation ; but the prevailing tone is that of grave and ironical banter. The effect, as witnessed to by Anthony Wood, Burnet, and other contemporary writers, was to set the whole public &quot; from the king to the tradesman &quot; in a laugh against Parker. This stung him to an ill-tempered rejoinder, affording Marvell a second opportunity, of which he availed himself so well that no more was heard from his opponent ; and Swift was shortly afterwards able to say that people remembered Parker s book only by Marvell s answer. Marvell s second con troversial work, Mr Smirke, or the Divine in Mode, was written in the same strain and under similar circumstances, and obtained a success fully equal to that of the Rehearsal Transprosed. It was a defence of Croft, bishop of Hereford, against a violent attack by Dr Turner, the High Church master of St John s, Cambridge. Prefixed to it was a &quot; short historical essay concerning general councils,&quot; intended to show the folly of religious imposi tions. Several other writings, often ascribed to him, more especially the Parliaments Anylise Declaratio, A Sensible Question and an Usefull Answer, and the Flagellum Parlia- mentarium, were certainly not his. As a humorist, then, and as a great parliament man,&quot; no name is of more interest to a student of the reign of Charles II. than that of Marvell. But other qualities entitle him to still higher respect. To a personal charm so great, to wit so brilliant, to learning so extensive, and to sympathies so wide that he was at the same time dear to John Milton and courted by Charles II., he joined the rarest quality of that evil time, a robust and intrepid rectitude. In the very heyday of political infamy, at a time when he says passionately &quot; we are all venal cowards except some few,&quot; and when opposition to the court was likely to be resented by personal violence of the brutalest kind, he, a needy man, obliged to accept wages from his constituents, tempted in winning phrases from royal lips by his old schoolfellow Danby, and with nothing to gain from the court by purity, kept his political virtue unspotted and unsuspected. The meaning of this fact can barely be felt by any one who has not read with minute care the annals of that time. When the grossest forms of self- indulgence were the ordinary habits of town life, Marvell was a temperate man, in spite of Aubrey s witness that he &quot;kept bottles of wine at his lodgings and would drink liberally by himself to refresh his spirits and exalt his muse.&quot; Lastly, in the worst times of parliamentary vio lence, he stood forward throughout his career as the champion of moderate and tolerant measures. His person corresponded singularly with his mind, so far as can be judged from the portrait by Hannemann and from the few words of John Aubrey &quot; He was of a middling stature, pretty strong set, roundish faced, cherry cheeked, hazel eyed, brown haired. In his conversation he was modest and of very few words.&quot; He died suddenly in 1678 on his return from Hull to take his seat in August. That he was poisoned, and at the instigation of the court, has been roundly asserted, naturally enough, though without the slightest foundation. The matter has been finally set at rest by a very interesting letter by Dr Samuel Gee in the Atkenseum for March 7, 1874. The following works may be consulted on Marvell : Life and Works (1) by Thomas Cooke, 2 vols., 1726 (there is a reprint by Thomas Davies in 1772) ; (2) by Captain Thomson, 3 vols. 4to, 1776 ; (3) by John Dove, 1832 ; (4) by Edwin Paxton Hood, 1853 ; and essays by Hartley Coleridge in Lives of the Northern Worthies, Henry Rogers in his collected Essays,-and an anonymous author in the Cornhill Magazine for July 1869, and in the Saturday Review for April 26, 1873. All these authorities are mentioned, collated, and corrected in the very important and laborious work of Mr Grosart, whose book, in spite of its excessive mannerism and one or two curious inaccuracies, is indispensable to the student of Marvell s correspondence and career. (0. A.) MAR WAR. See JODHPUR. MARY * (Mapt a, Mapta/x,), the mother of Jesus, at the time when the gospel history begins, had her home in 1 The name (Heb. DHD), that of the sister of Moses and Aaron, is of uncertain etymology ; many interpretations have been suggested, including &quot; stella maris,&quot; which, though it has attained considerable currency through Jerome (the Onomasticon), may be at once dismissed. It seems to have been very common among the Jews in New Testament times ; besides the subject of the present notice there are mentioned (1) &quot;Mary (the wife) of Clopas,&quot; who was perhaps the mother of James &quot;the little&quot; (d piKpos) and of Joses (see vol. xiii. pp. 552, 553) ; (2) Mary Magdalene, i.e., of Magdala ; (3) Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus ; (4) Mary the mother of Mark (see MARK) ; and (5) Mary, an otherwise unknown benefactress of the apostle Paul (Rom. xvi. 6).