satirical point than any of his poems. Every stanza contains an epigram; and each is relieved by a grave or playful allusion to the subject, and its term, "Nothing." Here is a grave stanza, which seems almost like irony as coming from so ribald a pen : but Rochester was a ribald from example and contamination, not from nature and principle. He thus writes on "Nothing:"

Yet this of thee the wise may truly say:

Thou from the virtuous Nothing tak'st away ;
And to be part of thee the wicked wisely pray.

The next stanza contains a playful sarcasm :

Whilst weighty Something modestly abstains
From princes' coffers, and from statesmen's brains;
And Nothing there like stately Nothing reigns.

And here is the summary and conclusion of the poem :

French truth, Dutch prowess, British policy,

Hibernian learning, Scotch civility,

Spaniards' despatch, Danes' wit, are mainly seen in thee!

As an instance that Rochester knew the better course of religious principles, although he was swayed by the evil, an anecdote is told of one of the Bishops at Court relating, in his hearing, to King Charles, the increase and popularity of Baxter the Nonconformist divine's preaching; adding, "I went down, your Majesty, into his neighbourhood, and preached myself; and yet, my congregation was very small, while Baxter's was too numerous for the church." Rochester quickly replied, "Your Majesty can be at no loss to recognise the cause of my lord Bishop's non-success in his mission; since his lordship confesses to your Majesty that he went to 'preach himself;' now Baxter preached no one but his Master." The playfulness of the retort harmonises with the feeling which dictated it.

In alluding to the great and glorious Andrew Marvell as a wit and satirist, it is almost impossible to separate his political from his literary career; for almost the whole of his compositions-civil, epistolary, and poetic-bear upon the one paramount and engrossing object of his pursuit that of serving his country and advancing her liberties with zeal, efficiency, and integrity. The prevailing characteristic of Marvell's mind (after his firmness and consistency of purpose) was his well-ordered balance of judgment with placability of nature. Marvell seems to have been the most reasonable of mortals, and, therefore, he was the object of hatred to the fanatics of the two extreme parties in the State. He inherited his humour from his father, who was an

eminent Calvinistic minister in Hull; the town which the son afterwards represented in Parliament for twenty years with such lustrous ability and rectitude. From his father, too, he imbibed his steady, cheerful piety, many of his little poems being embellished with some apt moral, or sweet and serene reflection. No one possessed more fully, and yet maintained more distinctly, the two qualities of a gentle gravity with an unmitigated freedom of satire and ridicule. Such, too, was the transparent honesty of his nature that, although opposed to the public conduct of Charles I., he wrote to his constituents an elegant and pathetic letter (which is said to be still in existence) upon the beheading of that impracticable and ill-advised monarch. So also in his satires upon the son, Charles ÌI., he lashes his follies and denounces his vices with an unqualifying plainness and freedom of speech; and yet, in the midst of all his vituperation, he constantly clung to the hope of better days and better deeds; and with the same honesty praised any of the royal actions the tendency of which was beneficial to the interests of his beloved country. Echard, who in his politics was violently opposed to him, nevertheless bears testimony to his honesty, for he says: "Both Marvell and Needham were pestilent wits; yet Marvell had the appearance of more honesty and steadiness;" and, indeed, his satires, homely and plain-speaking as they are, never betray a spirit of malignity: not even of bitterness; in short, to use the words of his divine teacher, he was "of the salt of the earth;" for throughout his public career there is not a single action upon record which merits the blot of censure. During each session of Parliament he was accustomed to write every day to his constituents an account of the public business that had been transacted in the House. In one of his letters he says that he "sat down to write at six in the evening, although he had not eaten since the day before at noon." It constituted part of his noble simplicity and integrity of character to dare to speak of himself in the following manner in one of his letters upon the opening of Parliament. He says: "In the general concerns of the nation, I shall maintain the same incorrupt mind and clear conscience, free from faction, or any self ends, which, by the grace of God, I have hitherto preserved:" and there was no cant or duplicity in this avowal; when the occasion demanded, he was at his post of consistency. Every one knows his answer to Lord Danby-worth repeating, nevertheless-who came to him with an offer of a thousand guineas from the king. After showing him the frugal meal he was about to eat, he said: "I am sure his Majesty will in future be too tender to attempt to bribe a man with golden apples who lives so well on the viands of his native country."

And when the nobleman was gone, the patriot had to borrow a guinea of his bookseller.

Marvell was not distinguished as a speaker in the House. He was better; he was a man of business. And it is said that his judgment in passing bills was sought for by every party, and never refused by him. He possessed a steady and high courage, and he He was once was equal to the occasion when required to exert it. warned of danger from assassination, and he replied, "I am not afraid of being killed; my only fear is, that I may kill a fellowcreature."

This glorious specimen of a human being was believed to have been carried off by poison in his fifty-eighth year, and was buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, as it used to be called. Such was the contemptible party-spirit of the time, that the clergyman of the parish would not allow an inscription to be placed on his monument, which described him in general terms to have been a true The plausible patriot and an uncorrupted and incorruptible man. reason for the refusal was that he was a Nonconformist, and consequently not a member of the Establishment.

The most Marvell's Satires possess but little modern interest. humorous and poignant among them are entitled "Clarendon's House-warming," a sharp attack upon the grasping disposition of that great lawyer; also, "Royal Resolutions," a fling at the unstable and fickle conduct of Charles II. ; and a dialogue between the two horses-the one at Charing Cross and the other at Whitchurch. His severer satires are upon Flecknoe, the poetaster-the man whom Dryden so ruthlessly mauled; and upon Colonel Blood, who His remonstrance with his attempted to steal the Crown jewels. "Coy Mistress," protesting against her tardy recognisance of his passion, is an agreeable specimen of his playful and well-bred humour.

The event of the Dutch war supplied the English wits of that age with a fertile theme for passing their jokes upon their amphibious neighbours. Marvell's is not so epigrammatic and condensed as Butler's, the illustrious author of "Hudibras ;" it is more discursive and classical in character; but it is quite as witty, and even, perhaps, more imaginative-mounting to its climax with a delightful flourish of the mock-heroic. The reader cannot fail to notice the felicitous choice of some of his terms, and, above all, his qualifying epithets. In two words, it is a great composition of the satire class.

Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land,

As but th' offscouring of the British sand;

And so much earth as was contributed
By English pilots when they heav'd the lead;
Or what by th' ocean's slow alluvion fell,
Of shipwreck'd cockle and the mussel-shell;
This indigested vomit of the sea

Fell to the Dutch by just propriety.

Glad, then, as miners that have found the ore,
They with mad labour fish'd the land to shore,
And div'd as desperately for each piece
Of earth, as if 't had been of ambergris ;
Collecting anxiously small loads of clay,
Less than what building swallows bear away,
Or than those pills which sordid beetles roll,
Transfusing into them their dunghill soul.
How did they rivet with gigantic piles
Thorough the centre their new-catchèd miles,
And to the stake a struggling country bound,
Where barking waves still bait the forced ground,
Building their watʼry Babel far more high

To reach the sea than those to reach the sky.
Yet still his claim the injur'd ocean laid,
And oft at leap-frog o'er their steeples play'd,
As if on purpose it on land had come

To show them what's their mare liberum.
A daily deluge over them does boil;
The earth and water play at level-coil.
The fish oft-times the burgher dispossess'd,
And sat, not as a meat, but as a guest ;
And oft the tritons and the sea-nymphs saw
Whole shoals of Dutch serv'd up for cavilau;
Or, as they over the new level rang'd,
For pickled herring pickled Heeren chang'd.
Nature, it seem'd, asham'd of her mistake,
Would throw their land away at duck-and-drake.
Therefore, Necessity, that first made kings,
Something like government among them brings.
For, as with pigmies, who best kills the crane;
Among the hungry, he that treasures grain;
Among the blind, the one-eyed blinkard reigns;
So rules among the drownèd he that drains.
Not who first sees the rising sun, commands;
But who could first discern the rising lands.
Who best could know to pump an earth so leak,
Him they their lord and country's father speak.
To make a bank was a great plot of State-
Invent a shovel, and be a magistrate!

A worthy tribute to the memory of the patriot, Marvell, was paid by Captain Thompson-a native, I believe, of Hull-who collected the greater part of his prose tracts, all his poems, and a large

number of his Parliamentary letters. The work comprises three quarto volumes.

The most eminent satirist that succeeds in chronological order is Dryden "Glorious John," as Claude Halcro, in Scott's novel of "The Pirate," calls him. The leading features in Dryden's intellectual faculty are: prodigious force of character, invention, and plan (most apparent in his satires); elegance, with unaffected ease and freedom; a nobly eloquent declamation; a sonorous, vehement, and harmoniously varied versification; a perfectly uncorrupted English style; and a power of expressing scorn and contempt that not unfrequently borders on the sublime. Dryden also possessed a remarkable felicity in the appropriation of the epithet; a quality which in our age is either generalised in the use or diluted with expletives; for redundancy and verbiage are the defects of modern writing. The prose style of Dryden may rank with the most purely classical in the language, an eminent specimen of which is to be found in his preface to his translation of Juvenal. The qualities in which he was defective were-tenderness, with which he did not appear to possess the remotest affinity; no rich store of fancy, or, indeed, of wit-except, indeed, in one branch of wit, the high-toned character of his invective; and in genuine humour he was still more deficient. These are grave drawbacks to urge against an undoubted genius; but whoever shall take the trouble to read through his twenty-seven plays, which were produced in the course of twentyfive years, will, I think, acknowledge this report to be just in the main. To my own and individual feeling the dramatic passion of Dryden is pompous bombast, and his pathos maudlin and unnatural. His comedy, moreover, has so little the air and ease of every-day life that he himself acknowledges his want of genius for that class of composition in his "Essay on Dramatic Poetry," prefixed to his "Indian Emperor." Even that "minnow among the Tritons," Elkanah Settle, the grand exemplar of poetasters, was the rival of Dryden on the stage, and for years he bore his reputation above him; a fact, although it be no proof of actual superiority; for every age can produce examples of adroit compliance with the vulgar taste in persons of mediocre talent, giving the possessors an ascendency in their favour which a superior and less compromising spirit would scorn to attain. Yet, in the instance of Dryden, this was not the case; for, however he may have been the victim of party prejudice during his life, the tranquil judgment of posterity has confirmed the decision. Besides, in his theatrical writings, he did pander to the detestable taste of that very detestable era in our history-both