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had promised his comfortable importance a simarre of the beards of all the orthodox theologues in Christendom." There is risen up this spiritual Mr. Bayes, who, having assumed to himself an incongruous plurality of ecclesiastical offices, one most severe of the penitentiary universal to the reformed churches; the other most ridiculous, of buffoon general to the Church of England, so that he may henceforth be capaple of any other promotion. And not being content to enjoy his own folly, he has taken two others into partnership, as fit for his design as those two that clubbed with Mahomet in making the Alcoran. But lest I might be mistaken as to the persons I mention, I will assure the reader that I intend not Hudibras; for he is a man of the other robe, and his excellent wit hath taken a flight far above these whifflers: that whoever dislikes the choice of his subject, cannot but commend his performance of it, and calculate, if on so barren a theme he were so copious, what admirable sport he would have made with an ecclesiastical politician."

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It is pleasant to read this acknowledgment of an enemy's merits, which shews that Andrew loved wit for its own sake, without looking at the party from which it proceeded. But it must be recollected that his "withers were unwrung." He was no Puritan,-no new-light man. If he inclined to one mode of church discipline rather than another, he chose that which he conceived most favourable to liberty.

Here he rises to a more solemn indignation :-" Once perhaps in a hundred years there may arise such a prodigy in the University (where all men else learn better arts and better manners), and from thence may creep into the church (where the teachers, at least, ought to be well. instructed in the knowledge and practice of Christianity); so prodi- gious a person, I say, may even there be hatched, who shall neither know nor care how to behave himself to God or man; and who, having never seen the receptacle of grace or conscience at an anatomical dissection, may conclude, therefore, that there is no such matter, or no such obligation, among Christians, who shall persecute the scripture itself, unless it will conform to his interpretation; who shall strive to put the world into blood, and animate princes to be the executioners of their own subjects for well-doing."

Of the correctness and elegance of Parker's style, the following passage, which Marvell quotes from page 663 of his Defence (what a book his defence must be!) which Marvell cuts up scientifically, may be a fair specimen :-" There sprung up a mighty bramble on the south side of the Lake Lemane that-such is the rankness of the soilspread and flourished with such a sudden growth, that, partly by the industry of his agents abroad, and partly by its own indefatigable pains

(The

and pragmaticalness, it quite overrun the whole Reformation." 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.' Abramble' 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

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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 so 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 sym. pathize with the sour, imagination-killing austerities of those separatists, whose cause it 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 matter. 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."

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 expression 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 :

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"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, motto's, &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.

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