is impossible to doubt that such a man in such a place was, in Mr. Disraeli’s phrase, a “personage.”  Yet when we look for recognition of what we feel sure was the fact, we fail to find it.  Bishop Burnet, in his delightful history, supplies us with sketches of the leading Parliamentarians of Marvell’s day, yet to Marvell himself he refers but once, and then not by name but as “the liveliest droll of the age,” words which mean much but tell little.  In Clarendon’s Autobiography, another book which lets the reader into the very clash and crowd of life, there is no mention of one of the author’s most bitter and cruel enemies.  With Prince Rupert, Marvell was credited by his contemporaries with a great intimacy; he was a friend of Harrington’s; it may be he was a member of the once famous “Rota” Club; it is impossible to resist the conviction that wherever he went he made a great impression, that he was a central figure in the lobbies of the House of Commons and a man of much account; yet no record survives either to convince posterity of his social charm or even to convey any exact notion of his personal character.

A somewhat solitary man he would appear to have been, though fond of occasional jollity.  He lived alone in lodgings, and was much immersed in business, about a good deal of which we know nothing except that it took him abroad.  His death was sudden, and when three years afterwards the first edition of his poems made its appearance, it was prefaced by a certificate signed “Mary Marvell,” to the effect that everything in the book was printed “according to the copies of my late dear husband.”  Until after Marvell’s death we never hear of Mrs. Marvell, and with this signed certificate she disappears.  In a series of Lives of Poets’ Wives it would be hard to make much of Mrs. Andrew Marvell.  For different but still cogent reasons it is hard to write a life of her famous husband.

Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead in Holdernesse, on Easter Eve, the 31st of March 1621, in the Rectory House, the elder Marvell, also Andrew, being then the parson of the parish.  No fitter birthplace for a garden-poet can be imagined.  Roses still riot in Winestead; the fruit-tree roots are as mossy as in the seventeenth century.  At the right season you may still

    “Through the hazels thick espy
    The hatching throstle’s shining eye.”

Birds, fruits and flowers, woods, gardens, meads, and rivers still make the poet’s birthplace lovely.

    “Loveliness, magic, and grace,
    They are here—­they are set in the world! 
    They abide! and the finest of souls
    Has not been thrilled by them all,
    Nor the dullest been dead to them quite. 
    The poet who sings them may die,
    But they are immortal and live,
    For they are the life of the world.”