Sir Philip Sidney, and Mr Milton." Ayres is remarkable as almost the only English sonneteer between Milton and Gray, but his sonnets, though sometimes singularly learned and precise in form, are seldom otherwise interesting. His book enjoyed no success, and we know nothing of his career, except that he was a personal friend of Dryden, and an excellent scholar.

I have, however, still to present the greatest and the most interesting of the poets who wrote during the Commonwealth in opposition to Waller and his followers. The name of Andrew Marvell is illustrious wherever political purity is valued, wherever intellectual liberty is defended. To dwell upon the qualities of a character so candid, and upon the virtues of so single-minded a patriot, may seem out of place in a disquisition on the rise of classical poetry in England, but this patriot, this exquisite citizen, was a poet also, and a poet worthy of his civic reputation. Nor was there anything inconsistent in the fact that a man whose hands were pure in an age of universal corruption, and who put the interests of the people first when public virtue had scarcely been discovered, should be a romantic idealist when he came to put his innermost thoughts down in metre. Marvell is nothing if not consistent, and we find the same

brain and heart engaged with rustic visions at Nunappleton and with the anger of statecraft at Westminster.

Dr Grosart discovered that Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead in Yorkshire on the 31st of March, 1621. His father, a Puritan divine, was translated to the wider field of a parish in Hull when his son was four years old, and eventually to the Mastership of the grammar-school there. The future poet lived at Hull under the paternal roof until he was fifteen. Whether he was very severely kept in check all that time may be doubted; his antagonist, Bishop Parker, in future years, accused him of having consorted with "boatswains and cabin-boys" along the tarry quays of Hull, and he may have thus early acquired that remarkable flow of bad language which makes his satires somewhat distressingly remarkable.

Like almost all the poets of the age, Marvell received his education at Cambridge. His father had belonged to the puritan college of Emmanuel, but the poet came to Trinity, whither he entered, just too late to be at the University with Milton, Cowley, or Waller, in 1633. While he was at Trinity, some men at Peterhouse, who were tools of the Jesuits, inveigled him over to Rome, and actually, it would appear, smuggled the boy up to one of their secret semi

naries in London. The story is, that his father had scent of this, and following his son up to town, found him in a bookseller's shop, captured him, and brought him, restored to the Church of England, safely back to Trinity. The case was by no means a solitary one at Cambridge, and the practice of the Jesuits was so alarming to parents, as indeed it well might be, that there was talk of passing a bill through Star Chamber to deal with it.

Andrew Marvell lost his admirable father in 1640, just before he himself left college. The circumstances of the death were romantic and have often been repeated. The worthy puritan set sail to cross the Humber in company with a lady, and with "a young beautiful couple who were going to be wedded." The day was calm and fair, but Mr Marvell had so strong a presentiment of death that he spoke of it cheerfully to those whom he left, and even threw his staff ashore, exclaiming, "Ho! for heaven!" The friends were only half way across the estuary, when a sudden storm arose, upset the boat, and utterly destroyed the whole party, no remains either of the vessel or of the passengers being ever recovered. It is said that the mother of the young lady who was thus untimely drowned consoled herself by a whimsical act of generosity, and that Marvell being left an

orphan through the accident, she sent for him. from college, and adopted him as her son. It is probable that the munificence of this lady, who was a near relative of Milton's friend Cyriack Skinner, supplied the young man with the funds needful to support him in France, Holland, Spain, and Italy for the next six years.

It may well be that Mrs Skinner, although she was able to support him during her lifetime, was unable to provide for her protégé after her death. At all events we find him in 1650 earning his livelihood as the tutor of Mary Fairfax, afterwards Duchess of Buckingham. This little maid, daughter of the great Lord Fairfax, was in her twelfth year at the time, and it appears that Marvell lived as her teacher in the house at Nunappleton for two years. This home of the Fairfaxes was a mansion romantically situated at the junction of the Ouse and the Wharfe, in the lowlands of Yorkshire, and on the very site of an ancient Cistercian nunnery. There can be very little doubt that the greater part of Marvell's lyrical poems were written at this house, from his twenty-ninth to his thirty-first year, in the beautiful seclusion from which Milton's famous letter called him, as by the blast of a trumpet. The neighbourhood of Nunappleton was all given up to

"fragrant gardens, shady woods,

Deep meadows and transparent floods,"

and its flowery wildernesses and rich grassy fields inspired the remarkable series of lyrics to which we must now give our attention.

The world is seldom told at what stray and occasional moments, how hurriedly, and again how seldom, a poet's inspiration flows. It may well be that the music lies frozen at a young man's heart until some peculiar condition in his circumstances, a chain of emotions called forth by some peaceful and novel situation, melts it into sudden poetry. In a few months, perhaps, the conditions change, the mind is released from its tension, and he has written in that short time most of what is to introduce him to posterity as a poet. In ages of general political disorder, and of civic and personal insecurity, this must particularly be the case. We know for how long a time the muse of Milton was silenced by public and private anxieties, and we should be ignorant of one great section of his genius, of his romantic and melodious power in lyrical writing, if it had not been for his retirement at Horton. What Horton was to Milton, Nunappleton was to Marvell, it made a lyrical poet of him.

This series of verses was carefully preserved by