A liberal journalist and writer, Leigh Hunt (1784–1859) did much to popularize Marvell's writings, both non-political and political, in his various publications.
(a) Extract from the Indicator, 24 November 1819, no. 7 (repr. 1822), pp.51–2.
We do not know, and perhaps it would be impossible to discover, whether Butler wrote his minor pieces before those of the great patriot Andrew Marvell, who rivalled him in wit and excelled him in poetry. Marvell, though born later, seems to have been known earlier as an author. He was certainly known publicly before him. But in the political poems of Marvell there is a ludicrous Character of Holland, which might be pronounced to be either the copy or the original of Butler's, if in those anti-Batavian times the Hollander had not been baited by all the wits; and were it not probable, that the unwieldy monotony of his character gave rise to much the same ludicrous imagery in many of their fancies. Marvell's wit has the advantage of Butler's, not in learning or multiplicity of contrasts (for nobody ever beat him there), but in a greater variety of them, and in being able, from the more poetical turn of his mind, to bring graver and more imaginative things to wait upon his levity.
He thus opens the battery upon our amphibious neighbour: [quotes ll. 1–6, 9–16]. He goes on in a strain of exquisite hyperbole: [quotes ll. 17–48].
We can never read these or some other ludicrous verses of Marvell, even when by ourselves, without laughter; but we must curtail our self-indulgence for the present.
(b) Extract from the Indicator, 27 September 1820, no. 51 (repr. 1822), p. 406.
The verses of Andrew Marvell prefixed to Paradise Lost, beginning
When I behold the poet, blind yet bold,
are well known to every reader of Milton, and justly admired by all who know what they read. We remember how delighted we were to find who Andrew Marvell was, and that he could be so pleasant and lively as well as grave. Spirited and worthy as this panegyric is, the reader who is not thoroughly acquainted with Marvell's history does not know all their spirit and worth. That true friend and excellent patriot stuck to his old acquaintance, at a period when all canters and timeservers turned their backs upon him, and would have made the very knowledge of him, which they themselves had had the honour of sharing, the ruin of those that put their desertion to the blush. There is a noble burst of indignation on this subject, in one of Marvell's prose works, against one Parker, who succeeded in getting made a bishop. Parker seems to have thought that Marvell would have been afraid of acknowledging his old acquaintance; but so far from resembling the bishop in that or any other particular, he not only publicly proclaimed and gloried in the friendship of the overshadowed poet, but reminded Master Parker that he had once done the same.
(c) Extract from the Literary Examiner, 6 September 1823, no. 83, pp. 148–9.
On the Latin Poems of Milton
Epigram the 13th and last is very noble. It is addressed, in the name of Cromwell, to Christina, Queen of Sweden; and accompanied a present which he made her of his portrait. A doubt has been raised whether it was written by Milton or Andrew Marvell, a man quite capable of the performance; but as Marvell was not then associated with Milton in the office of secretary, the chance appears in favour of the latter. However, the verses were published in the posthumous collection of Marvell's poems, which were ‘printed,’ says his nominal wife Mary (who appears to have been married to him after some fashion of his own) ‘according to the exact copies of my late dear husband, under his own hand-writing.’ Marvell, besides being the inventor of our modern prose style in wit, and an inflexible patriot, had a strong and grave talent for poetry, as the reader may see (and ought to see) in his song about the Bermudas boat, his lines on a Wounded Fawn, the verses in which he mentions ‘Fairfax and the starry Vere,’ and those others where he speaks of
Tearing our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
His satire is sometimes coarse, and must be excused by the age he lived in; but it was witty and formidable. His spirit, at once light and powerful, hung admirably between the two parties of Dissenters and Cavaliers; was the startling shield of the one, and a sword still more perplexing to the other: for it could dip and fashion its sturdy metal in the levity of their own fires. His talent at exaggeration, at running a joke down, is exquisite. He was Milton's admiring and inflexible friend.—But I forget the verses before us.
Ad Christinam Suecorum Reginam,
Nomine Cromwelli.
[Quotes the Latin.]
The following translation, which it would be difficult to excell, appeared in Toland's Life of Milton:—
Bright martial Maid, Queen of the Frozen Zone!
The northern pole supports thy shining throne:
Behold what furrows age and steel can plow;
The helmet's weight oppressed this wrinkled brow.
Through fate's untrodden paths I move; my hands
Still act my freeborn people's bold commands:
Yet this stern shade to you submits his frowns,
Nor are these looks always severe to crowns.
[‘Englished’ by Sir F.S.]
Mr. Todd ingeniously conjectures, that the appellations of Martial Maid and Lucid Star (for that also is given her in the original) might allude ‘to a gold coin of the Queen, on one side of which she is represented with a helmet as Minerva; the other side exhibiting the sun.’ Perhaps she sent it to Cromwell when it was struck, and his portrait was a return for it.—‘These lines,’ says Warton, speaking of the original, ‘are simple and sinewy. They present Cromwell in a new and pleasing light, and throw an air of amiable dignity on his rough and obstinate character. The uncrowned Cromwell,’ he continues, ‘had no reason to approach a princess with so much reverence who had renounced her crown.’ (Perhaps this however was what particularly excited the reverence of the poet.)
(d) Extract from the Monthly Repository, NS 1 (July 1837–April 1838), pp. 413–14.
But we now come to the great wit and partizan, Andrew Marvell, whose honesty baffled the arts of the Stuarts, and whose pamphlets and verses had no mean hand in putting an end to their dynasty. He unites wit with earnestness and depth of sentiment, beyond any miscellaneous writer in the language. Glorious Andrew's partizanship did not hinder his being of the party of all mankind, and doing justice to what was good in the most opposite characters. In a panegyric on Cromwell he has taken high gentlemanly occasion to record the dignity of the end of Charles the First [quotes ll. 9–16, 21–36].
The emphatic cadence of this couplet,
—Bow'd his comely head
Down, as upon a bed,
is in the best taste of his friend Milton, with greater simplicity than the latter usually evinced.
(e) Extract from ‘An Illustrative Essay’ in Wit and Humour Selected from the English Poets (1846), reprinted from the 1876 edition, pp. 33–5.
The two best pieces of comic exaggeration I am acquainted with (next to whole poems like Hudibras) are the Descriptions of Holland by the author of that poem, and Andrew Marvel. The reader will find passages of them in the present volume. Holland and England happened to be great enemies in the time of Charles the Second, and the wits were always girding at the Dutchmen and their ‘ditch.’ Butler calls them a people
That feed, like cannibals, on other fishes,
And serve their cousins-germ an up in dishes:—[ll. 13–14]
and Marvel, in the same strain, says,
The fish oft-times the burgher dispossess'd,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest, [ll. 29–30]
Hazlitt, in his observations on Marvel (Lectures ut sup., Templeman's edition, p. 105), cannot see the jest in this line. He thinks it ‘forced’ and ‘far-fetched.’ I remember he made the same observation once to Charles Lamb and myself, and was entering into a very acute discourse to prove that we ought not to laugh at such exaggerations, when we were forced to interrupt him by a fit of laughter uncontrollable. The exaggerations, no doubt, are extremely far-fetched, but they are not forced; Marvel could have talked such by the hundred ad libitum; and it is this easiness and flow of extravagance, as well as the relative truth lurking within it, that renders it delightful to those who have animal spirits enough to join the merriment; which Hazlitt had not. His sense of humour, strong as it was, did not carry him so far as that. Had it done so, I doubt whether, on the very principle of extremes meeting, he would have enumerated among his provocatives to laughter ‘a funeral,’ ‘a wedding,’ or even ‘a damned author, though he may be our friend.’ What he says about the difficulty of bearing demands on our gravity is very true. I would not answer for my own upon occasions of common formal solemnity, or even at ‘a sermon,’ if the preacher were very bad. But the same liability to sympathy with the extremest present emotion, which would have made him laugh heartily with Marvel, would probably have absorbed him in the troubles and griefs of the other occasions, and so prevented his having a thought of laughter: for he was a very goodnatured man at heart. But the risibilities of the serious are not always to be accounted for.
(f) Extract from ‘Andrew Marvell’ in Wit and Humour, reprinted from the 1876 edition, pp. 214–21.
ANDREW MARVEL, a thoughtful and graceful poet, a masterly prose-writer and controversialist, a wit of the first water, and above all, an incorruptible patriot, is thought to have had no mean hand in putting an end to the dynasty of the Stuarts. His wit helped to render them ridiculous, and his integrity added weight to the sting. The enmity, indeed, of such a man was in itself a reproach to them; for Marvel, though bred on the Puritan side, was no Puritan himself, nor a foe to any kind of reasonable and respectable government. He had served Cromwell with his friend Milton, as Latin Secretary, but would have aided Charles the Second as willingly, in his place in Parliament, had the king been an honest man instead of a pensioner of France. The story of his refusing a carte blanche from the king's treasurer, and then sending out to borrow a guinea, would be too well known to need allusion to it in a book like the present, if it did not contain a specimen of a sort of practical wit.
Marvel being pressed by the royal emissary to state what would satisfy his expectations, and finding that there was no other mode of persuading him that he had none, called in his servant to testify to his dining three days in succession upon one piece of mutton.
Even the wise and refined Marvel, however, was not free from the coarseness of his age; and hence I find the same provoking difficulty as in the case of his predecessors, with regard to extracts from the poetical portion of his satire. With the prose I should not have been at a loss. But the moment these wits of old time began rhyming, they seem to have thought themselves bound to give the same after-dinner licence to their fancy, as when they were called upon for a song. To read the noble ode on Cromwell, in which such a generous compliment is paid to Charles the First,—the devout and beautiful one entitled Bermuda, and the sweet overflowing fancies put into the mouth of the Nymph lamenting the loss of her Faun,—and then to follow up their perusal with some, nay most of the lampoons that were so formidable to Charles and his brother, you would hardly think it possible for the same man to have written both, if examples were not too numerous to the contrary. Fortunately for the reputation of Marvel's wit, those who choose to become acquainted with it, he wrote a great deal better in prose than verse, and the prose does not take the licence of the verse. Hence, as Swift for another reason observes, we can still read with pleasure his answer to his now forgotten antagonist Parker. Of his witty poems, I can only give a single one entire, which is the following. The reader knows the impudent Colonel Blood, who, in the disguise of a clergyman, attempted to steal the crown, in payment (as he said) of dues withheld from him in Ireland. Marvel had not forgotten the days of Laud, and he saw people still on the bench of bishops who were for renewing the old persecutions. Hence the bitterness of the implication made against prelates.
[Quotes ‘On Blood's Stealing the Crown.’]
[Quotes ‘Description of Holland,’ ll. 1–6; 9–48, with the following note:]
The jest of this effusion lies in the intentional and excessive exaggeration. To enjoy it thoroughly, it is necessary perhaps that the reader should be capable, in some degree, of the like sort of jesting, or at least have animal spirits enough to run willing riot with the extravagance. Mr. Hazlitt, for defect of these, could see no kind of joke in it, notwithstanding his admiration of Marvel. He once began an argument with Charles Lamb and myself, to prove to us that we ought not to laugh at such things. Somebody meanwhile was reading the verse; and the only answer which they left us the power to make to our critical friend was by laughing immeasurably. But I have mentioned this in the Introductory Essay.
[Quotes Flecknoe,' ll. 1–14, 19–36, 45–94, with the following note:]
Poor Flecnoe was the poetaster, after whom Dryden christened Shadwell ‘MacFlecnoe.’ See passages from the satire thus entitled in the present volume. The verses before us, which are written in the same spirit of exaggeration as the preceding, exhibit that strange ruggedness in the versification, which was intentional in the satirists of those days when they used the heroic measure, and which they took to be the representative of the satirical numbers of Horace or his predecessors. Flecnoe luckily appears to have rendered the most good-natured poets callous, by a corresponding insensibility to the hardest attacks.