“Dr. Parker will be out the next week.  I have seen it—­already three hundred and thirty pages and it will be much more. (It was five hundred twenty-eight pages.) I perceive by what I have read that it is the rudest book, one or other, that ever was published, I may say since the first invention of printing.  Although it handles me so roughly, yet I am not at all amated by it.  But I must desire the advice of some few friends to tell me whether it will be proper for me and in what way to answer it.  However I will for mine own private satisfaction forthwith draw up an answer that shall have as much of spirit and solidity in it as my ability will afford and the age we live in will endure.  I am, if I may say it with reverence, drawn in I hope by a good Providence to intermeddle on a noble and high argument.  But I desire that all the discourse of my friends may run as if no answer ought to be expected to so scurrilous a book.”—­(Hist.  MSS.  Comm., Portland Papers, iii. 337.)

The title-page of the Second Part of the Rehearsal Transprosed is a curiosity:—­

THE
REHEARSALL
TRANSPROS’D: 

* * * * *

THE SECOND PART.

* * * * *

Occasioned by Two Letters:  The first Printed
by a nameless Author, Intituled, A
Reproof, etc.

The Second Letter left for me at a Friends
House, Dated Nov. 3, 1673.  Subscribed
J.G. and concluding with these words;
If thou darest to Print or Publish any
Lie or Libel against Doctor Parker, By
the Eternal God I will cut thy Throat.

* * * * *

Answered by ANDREW MARVEL.

* * * * *

LONDON,

Printed for Nathaniel Ponder at the Peacock
in Chancery Lane near Fleet-Street, 1673.

The Second Part is an exceedingly witty though too lengthy a performance.  Marvell’s “companion picture” of Parker is full of matter, and of the very spirit of the times.  Some of it must be given:—­

“But though he came of a good mother, he had a very ill sire.  He was a man bred toward the Law, and betook himself, as his best practice, to be a sub-committee-man, or, as the stile ran, one of the Assistant Committee in Northamptonshire.  In the rapine of that employment, and what he got by picking the teeth of his masters, he sustain’d himself till he had raked together some little estate.  And then, being a man for the purpose, and that had begun his fortune out of the sequestration of the estates of the King’s Party, he, to perfect it the more, proceeded to take away their lives; not in the hot and military way (which diminishes always the offence), but in the cooler blood and sedentary execution of an High Court of Justice.  Accordingly he was preferr’d to be one of that number that gave sentence against the three