“Great men have been among us; hands that penn’d
    And tongues that utter’d wisdom, better none: 
    The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington.”

In 1726 Thomas Cooke printed an edition of Marvell’s works which contains the poetry that was in the folio of 1681, and in 1772 Cooke’s edition was reprinted by T. Davies.  It was probably Davies’s edition that Charles Lamb, writing to Godwin on Sunday, 14th December 1800, says he “was just going to possess”:  a notable addition to Lamb’s library, and an event in the history of the progress of Marvell’s poetical reputation.  Captain Thompson’s edition, containing the Horatian Ode and other pieces, followed in 1776.  In the great Poetical Collection of the Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly[229:1] called “Johnson’s Poets” (improperly, because the poets were, with four exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers, anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place.  Mr. George Ellis, in his Specimens of the early English poets first published in 1803, printed from Marvell Daphne and Chloe (in part) and Young Love.  When Mr. Bowles, that once famous sonneteer, edited Pope in 1806, he, by way of belittling Pope, quoted two lines from Marvell, now well known, but unfamiliar in 1806:—­

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

He remarked upon them, “the last circumstance is new, highly poetical, and could only have been described by one who was a real lover of nature and a witness of her beauties in her most solitary retirement.”  On this Mark Pattison makes the comment that the lines only prove that Marvell when a boy went bird-nesting (Essays, vol. ii. p. 374), a pursuit denied to Pope by his manifold infirmities.  The poet Campbell, in his Specimens (1819), gave an excellent sketch of Marvell’s life, and selected The Bermudas, The Nymph and Fawn, and Young Love.  Then came, fresh from talk with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, with his Select Poets (1825), which contains the Horatian Ode, Bermudas, To his Coy Mistress, The Nymph and Fawn, A Drop of Dew, The Garden, The Gallery, Upon the Hill and Grove at Billborow.  In this choice we may see the hand of Charles Lamb, as Tennyson’s may be noticed in the selection made in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury (1863).  Dean Trench in his Household Book of English Poetry (1869) gives Eyes and Tears, the Horatian Ode, and A Drop of Dew.  In Mr. Ward’s English Poets (1880) Marvell is represented by The Garden, A Drop of Dew, The Bermudas, Young Love, the Horatian Ode, and the Lines on Paradise Lost.  Thanks to these later Anthologies and to the quotations from The Garden and Upon Appleton House in the Essays of Elia, Marvell’s fame as a true poet has of recent years become widespread, and is now, whatever vicissitudes it may have endured, well established.