Andrew Marvell | Page 8

The lady, doubtless, had
money, and Andrew Marvell was in need of money, and appears to
have been supplied with it. It is quite possible the tradition is true.
FOOTNOTES:
[6:1] Fuller's Worthies (1662), p. 159.
[8:1] "The Fuller Worthies Library," 4 vols., 1872. Hereafter referred to
as Grosart.
[8:2] _Mr. Smirke or the Divine in Mode._--Grosart, iv. 15.
[11:1] Autobiography of Matthew Robinson. Edited by J.E.B. Mayor,
Cambridge, 1856.
[12:1] Behemoth, Hobbes' Works (Molesworth), vol. vi., see pp. 168,
218, 233-6.
[12:2] Worthington's Diary, vol. i. p. 5 (Chetham Society).
[13:1] Fuller, History of Cambridge University (1655), p. 167.

[14:1] Fuller, p. 166.
[15:1] Grosart, I., xxviii.
[15:2] See Worthington's Diary, vol. i. p. 7.
CHAPTER II
"THE HAPPY GARDEN-STATE"
The seventeenth century was the century of travel for educated
Englishmen--of long, leisurely travel. Milton's famous Italian tour
lasted fifteen months. John Evelyn's _Wander-Jahre_ occupied four
years. Andrew Marvell lived abroad in France, Spain, Holland, and
Italy from 1642 to 1646, and we have Milton's word for it that when the
traveller returned he was well acquainted with the French, Dutch,
Spanish, and Italian languages. Andrew Marvell was a highly
cultivated man, living in a highly cultivated age, in daily converse with
scholars, poets, philosophers, and men of very considerable scientific
attainments. In reading Clarendon and Burnet, and whilst turning over
Aubrey's delightful gossip, it is impossible not to be struck with the
width and variety of the learning as well as with the wit of the period.
Intellectually it was a great age.
No record remains of Marvell's travels during these years. Up and
down his writings the careful reader will come across pleasant
references to foreign manners and customs, betokening the keen
humorous observer, and the possession of that wide-eyed faculty that
takes a pleasure, half contemplative, half the result of animal spirits, in
watching the way of the world wherever you may chance to be. Of
another and an earlier traveller, Sir Henry Wotton, we read in "Walton's
Life."
"And whereas he was noted in his youth to have a sharp wit and apt to
jest, that by time, travel, and conversation was so polished and made
useful, that his company seemed to be one of the delights of mankind."
In all Marvell's work, as poet, as Parliamentarian, as controversialist,

we shall see the travelled man. Certainly no one ever more fully
grasped the sense of the famous sentence given by Wotton to Milton,
when the latter was starting on his travels: "_I pensieri stretti ed il viso
sciolto._"
Marvell was in Rome about 1645. I can give no other date during the
whole four years. This, our only date, rests upon an assumption. In
Marvell's earliest satirical poem he gives an account of a visit he paid
in Rome to the unlucky poetaster Flecknoe, who was not in Rome until
1645. If, therefore, the poem records an actual visit, it follows that the
author of the poem was in Rome at the same time. It is not very near,
but it is as near as we can get.
Richard Flecknoe was an Irish priest of blameless life, with a passion
for scribbling and for printing. His exquisite reason for both these
superfluous acts is worth quoting:--
"I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation (of
idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do it only not
to be thought dead whilst I am alive."[20:1]
Such frankness should have disarmed ridicule, but somehow or another
this amiable man came to be regarded as the type of a dull author, and
his name passed into a proverb for stupidity, so much so that when
Dryden in 1682 was casting about how best to give pain to Shadwell,
he devised the plan of his famous satire, "MacFlecknoe," where in
biting verse he describes Flecknoe (who was happily dead) as an aged
Prince--
"Who like Augustus young Was called to empire and had governed
long; In prose and verse was owned, without dispute, Through all the
realms of nonsense absolute."
Dryden goes on to picture the aged Flecknoe,
"pondering which of all his sons was fit To reign and wage immortal
war with Wit,"

and fixing on Shadwell.
"Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dulness from his
tender years; Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he Who stands
confirmed in full stupidity: The rest to some faint meaning make
pretence, But Shadwell never deviates into sense."
Thus has it come about that Flecknoe, the Irish priest, whom Marvell
visited in his Roman garret in 1645, bears a name ever memorable in
literature.
Marvell's own poem, though eclipsed by the splendour of Glorious
John's resounding lines, has an interest of its own as being, in its
roughly humorous way, a