PARKER AND MARVELL. MARVELL the founder of "a newly-refined art of jeering buffoonery"-his knack of nicknaming his adversaries-PARKER's Portrait-PARKER suddenly changes his principleshis declamatory style-MARVELL prints his anonymous letter as a motto to "The Rehearsal Transprosed"-describes him as "an At-all"-MARVELL's ludicrous des→ cription of the whole posse of answers summoned together by PARKER-MARVELL'S cautious allusion to MILTON-his solemn invective against PARKER-anecdote of MARVELL and Parker-PARKER retires after the second part of "The Rehearsal transprosed"-The Recreant, reduced to silence, distils his secret vengeance in a posthumous libel. ONE of the legitimate ends of Satire, and one of the proud triumphs of Genius, is to unmask the false zealot; to beat back the haughty spirit that is treading down all; and if it cannot teach modesty, and raise a blush, at least to inflict terror and silence. It is then that the Satirist does honour to the office of the executioner. "As one whose whip of steel can with a lash The quarrel between PARKER and MARVELL is a striking example of the efficient powers of genius, in first humbling, and then annihilating an unprincipled bravo, who had placed himself at the head of a faction. Marvell, the under-secretary and the bosom-friend of Milton, whose fancy he has often caught in his verse, was one of the greatest wits of the luxuriant age of Charles II.; he was a master in all the arts of ridicule; and his inexhaustible spirit only required some permanent subject to have rivalled the causticity of Swift, whose style, in neatness and vivacity, seems to have been modelled on his 2. But Marvell placed the oblation of genius on a temporary altar, and the sacrifice sunk with it; he wrote to the times, and with the times his writings have passed away; yet something there is incorruptible in wit, and wherever its salt has fallen, that part is still preserved. Such are the vigour and fertility of Marvell's writings, that our old Chronicler of Literary History, Anthony Wood, consi 2 Randolph's Muses' Looking-glass. Act I, Scene 4. Swift certainly admired, if he did not imitate Marvell for in his "Tale of a Tub" he says, "We still read Marvell's answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book it answers be sunk long ago." ders him as the founder of "the then newly-refined art (though much in mode and fashion almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonery';" and the crabbed humorist describes "this pen-combat as briskly managed on both sides; a jerking flirting way of writing entertaining the reader, by seeing two such right cocks of the game so keenly engaging with sharp and dangerous weapons."-Burnet calls Marvell "the liveliest droll of the age, who writ in a burlesque strain, but with so peculiar and entertaining a conduct, that from the king to the tradesman, his books were read with great pleasure.” Charles II. was a more polished judge than these uncouth critics; and, to the credit of his impartiality, for that witty monarch and his dissolute court were never spared by Marvell, who remained inflexible to his seduction, he deemed Marvell the best Prose Satirist of the age. But Marvell had other qualities than the freest humour and the finest wit in this "newly-refined art," which seems to have escaped these grave critics-a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an eloquence of invectives that awes one with the spirit of the modern Junius, and may give some notion of that more ancient satirist, whose writings are said to have so completely answered their design, that, after perusal, their victim hanged himself on the first tree; and in the present case, though the delinquent did not lay violent hands on himself, he did what, for an author, 'This is a curious remark of Wood's: how came raillery and satire to be considered as a newly-refined art?" Has it not, at all periods, been prevalent among every literary people? The remark is, however, more founded on truth than it appears, and arose from Wood's own feelings. Wit and Raillery had been so strange to us during the gloomy period of the fanatic Commonwealth, that honest Anthony, whose prejudices did not run in favour of Marvell, not only considers him as the "restorer of this newly-refined art," but as one "hugely versed in it," and acknowledges all its efficacy in the complete discomfiture of his haughty rival. Besides this, a small book of controversy, such as Marvell's usually are, was another novelty-the "aureoli libelli," as one fondly calls his precious books, were in the wretched taste of the times, rhapsodies in folio. The reader has doubtless heard of Caryll's endless "Commentary on Job," consisting of 2400 folio pages! in small type. Of that monument of human perseverance, which commenting on Job's patience, inspired what few works do to whoever read them, the exercise of the virtue it inculcated, the publisher, in his advertisement in Clavel's Catalogue of Books, 1681, announces the two folios in 600 sheets each! these were a republication of the first edition, in twelve volumes quarto! he apologises that "it hath been so long a doing, to the great vexation and loss of the proposer." He adds, “indeed, some few lines, no more than what may be contained in a quarto page, are expunged, they not relating to the Exposition, which nevertheless some, by malicious prejudice, have so unjustly aggravated, as if the whole work had been disordered." He apologises for curtailing a few lines from 2400 folio pages! and he considered that these few lines were the only ones that did not relate to the Exposition! At such a time, the little books of Marvell must have been considered as relishing morsels after such indigestible surfeits. may be considered as desperate a course," withdraw from the town, and cease writing for some years The celebrated work here to be noticed is Marvell's "Rehearsal Transposed;" a title facetiously adopted from Bayes in "The Rehearsal Transprosed" of the Duke of Buckingham. It was written against the works and the person of Dr. Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, whom he designates under the character of Bayes, to denote the incoherence and ridiculousness of his character. Marvell had a peculiar knack of calling names,-it consisted in appropriating a ludicrous character in some popular comedy, and dubbing his adversaries with it. In the same spirit he ridiculed Dr. Turner of Cambridge, a brother genius to Parker, by nick-naming him "Mr. Smirk, the Divine in Mode," the name of the Chaplain in Etherege's “Man of Mode," and thus, by a stroke of the pen, conveyed an idea of " a neat, starched, formal, and forward Divine." This application of a fictitious character to a real one, this christening a man with ridicule, though of no difficult invention, is not a little hazardous to inferior writers; for it requires not less wit than Marvell's to bring out of the real character, the ludicrous features which mark the fictitious prototype. Parker himself must have his portrait, and if the likeness be justly hit off, some may be reminded of a resemblance. Mason applies the epithet of" Mitred Dullness" to him: but although he was at length reduced to railing and to menaces, and finally mortified into silence, this epithet does not suit so hardy and so active an adventurer. The secret history of Parker may be collected in Marvell2; and his more public one in our honest chronicler, Anthony Wood. Parker was originally educated in strict sectarian principles; a starch Puritan, "fasting and praying with the Presbyterian students weekly, and who, for their refection feeding only on thin broth made of oatmeal and water, were commonly called Gruellers." "Among these," says Marvell, "it was observed that he was wont to put more graves than all the rest into his porridge, and was deemed one of the preciousest young men in the University." It seems that these mortified saints, both the brotherhood and the sisterhood, held their chief meetings at the house of "Bess Hampton, an old and crooked maid that drove the trade of laundry, who being from her youth very much given to the godly party, as they call themselves, had frequent meetings, especially for those that were her customers." Such is the 'So Burnet tells us. 3 2 See "The Rehearsal Transprosed, the second part," p. 76. 3 One of the canting terms used by the saints of those days, and not obsolete in the dialect of those who still give themselves out to be saints in the present. II. 10 published eleven" Dialogues of the Dead," supposed to be written by a student at Padua, concerning" one Bentivoglio, a very troublesome critic in the world; " where, under the character of "Signior Moderno," Wotton falls into his place. Whether these dialogues mortified Bentley, I know not: they ought to have afforded him very high amusement. But when man is at once tickled and pinched, the operation requires a gentler temper than Bentley's. "Humty-Dumty," indeed, had Bentley too often before him. There was something like inveteracy in his wit; but he who invented the remarkable index to Boyle's book, must have closely studied Bentley's character. He has given it with all its protuberant individuality'. Bentley, with his peculiar idiom, had censured "all the stiffness and stateliness, and operoseness of style, quite alien from the character of Phalaris, a man of business and despatch." Boyle keenly turns his own words on Bentley, "Stiffness and stateliness, and operoseness of style, is indeed quite alien from the character of a man of business; and being but a library-keeper, it is not over-modestly done, to oppose his judgment and taste to that of Sir WILLIAM TEMPLE, who knows more of these things than Dr. Bentley does of Hesychius and Suidas. Sir William Temple has spent a good part of his life in own notion of his volume seems equally modest and just. "To undervalue this dispute about Phalaris, because it does not suit one's own studies, is to quarrel with a circle, because it is not a square. If the question be not of vulgar use, it was writ therefore for a few; for even the greatest performances, upon the most important subjects, are no entertainment at all to the many of the world." -P. 107. 'This index, a very original morsel of literary pleasantry, is at once a satirical character of the great critic, and what it professes to be. I preserve a specimen among the curiosities I am collecting. It is entitled, "A Short Account of Dr. BENTLEY, by way of Index. "Dr. Bentley's true story proved false, by the testimonies of, etc. p. transacting affairs of state : he has written to kings, and they to him; and this has qualified him to judge, how kings should write, much better than the library-keeper at St.-James's.". This may serve as a specimen of the Attic style of the Controversy. Hard words sometimes passed. Boyle complains of some of the similes which Bentley employs, more significant than elegant. For the new readings of Phalaris," he likens me to a bungling tinker, mending old kettles." Correcting the faults of the version, he says, "the first epistle cost me four pages in scouring;" and, "by the help of a Greek proverb, he calls me downright ass." But while Boyle complains of these sprinklings of ink, he himself contributes to Bentley's Collection of Asinine Proverbs, and "throws him in one out of Aristophanes," of "an ass carrying mysteries:" "a proverb, says Erasmus, (as 'the Bees' construe him,) applied to those who were preferred to some place they did not deserve, as when a dunce was made a library-keeper.” Some ambiguous threats are scattered in the volume, while others are more intelligible. When Bentley, in his own defence, had referred to the opinions which some learned foreigners entertained of him-they attribute these to "the foreigners, because they are foreigners; we, that have the happiness of a nearer conversation with him, know him better; and we may perhaps take an opportunity of setting these mistaken strangers right in their opinions." They threaten him with his character, "in a tongue that will last longer, and go further, than their own;" and, in the imperious style of Festus, adds :-" Since Dr. Bentley has appealed to foreign universities, to foreign universities he must go." Yet this is light, compared with the odium they would raise against him by the menace of the resentments of a whole society of learned men. "Single adversaries die and drop off: but societies are immortal: their resentments are sometimes delivered down from hand to hand; and when once they have begun with a man, there is no knowing when they will leave him." In reply to this literary anathema, Bentley was furnished, by his familiarity with his favourite authors, with a fortunate application of a term, derived from Phalaris himself. Cicero had conveyed his idea of Cæsar's cruelty by this term, which he invented from the very name of the tyrant'. "There is a certain temper of mind that Cicero calls Phalarism; a spirit like Phalaris's. One would be apt to imagine that a portion of it had descended upon some of his translators. The gentleman has given a broad hint more than once in his book, ! Cicero ad Atticum, Lib. vii., Epist. xii. |