I would be apt to imagine that a portion of it had over and over again. He has slain me twice by descended upon some of his translators. The two several deaths! one, in the first page of his gentleman has given a broad hint more than once book; and another, in the last. In the title-page in his book, that if I proceed further against Pha- I die the death of Milo, the Crotonian :— laris, I may draw, perhaps, a duel, or a stab upon myself: a generous threat to a divine, who neither carries arms nor principles fit for that sort of controversy. I expected such usage from the spirit of Phalarism." In this controversy, the amusing fancy of " the Bees" could not pass by Phalaris without contriving to make some use of that brazen bull by which he tortured men alive. Not satisfied in their motto, from the Earl of Roscommon, with wedging" the great critic, like Milo, in the timber he strove to rend," they gave him a second death in their finis, by throwing Bentley into Phalaris's bull, and flattering their vain imaginations that they heard him "bellow." "He has defied Phalaris, and used him very coarsely, under the assurance, as he tells us, that he is out of his reach.' Many of Phalaris's enemies thought the same thing, and repented of their vain confidence afterwards in his bull. Dr. Bentley is perhaps, by this time, or will be suddenly, satisfied that he also has presumed a little too much upon his distance; but it will be too late to repent when he begins to bellow *." Bentley, although the solid force of his mind was not favourable to the lighter sports of wit, yet was not quite destitute of those airy qualities; nor does he seem insensible to the literary merits of "that odd work," as he calls Boyle's volume, which he conveys a very good notion of :-" If his book shall happen to be preserved anywhere as an useful common-place book for ridicule, banter, and all the topics of calumny." With equal dignity and sense he observes on the ridicule so freely used by both parties-" I am content that what is the greatest virtue of his book should be counted the greatest fault of mine." His reply to "Milo's fate," and the tortures he was supposed to pass through when thrown into Phalaris's bull, is a piece of sarcastic humour which will not suffer by comparison with the volume more celebrated for its wit. "The facetious Examiner' seems resolved to vie with Phalaris himself in the science of Phalarism; for his revenge is not satisfied with one single death of his adversary, but he will kill me -"Remember Milo's end, Wedged in that timber which he strove to rend." "The application of which must be this:That as Milo, after his victories at six several Olympiads, was at last conquered and destroyed in wrestling with a tree, so I, after I had attained to some small reputation in letters, am to be quite baffled and run down by wooden antagonists. But in the end of his book, he has got me into Phalaris's bull; and he has the pleasure of fancying that he hears me begin to bellow. Well, since it is certain that I am in the bull, I have performed the part of a sufferer. For as the cries of the tormented in old Phalaris's bull, being conveyed through pipes lodged in the machine, were turned into music for the entertainment of the tyrant, so the complaints which my torments express from me, being conveyed to Mr. Boyle by this answer, are all dedicated to his pleasure and diversion. But yet, methinks, when he was setting up to be Phalaris junior, the very omen of it might have deterred him. As the old tyrant himself, at last, bellowed in his own bull, his imitators ought to consider, that at long run their own actions may chance to overtake them."-P. 43. Wit, however, enjoyed the temporary triumph: not but that some, in that day, loudly protested against the award †. "The Episode of Bentley and Wotton," in "The Battle of the Books," is conceived with all the caustic imagination of the first of our prose satirists. There Bentley's great + Sir Richard Blackmore, in his bold attempt at writing "A Satire against Wit," in utter defiance of it, without any however, conveys some opinions of the times. He there paints the great critic, "crowned with applause," seated amidst "the spoils of ruined wits :" "Till his rude strokes had thresh'd the empty sheaf, Methought there had been something else than chaff." Boyle, not satisfied with the undeserved celebrity conceded to his volume, ventured to write poetry, in which no one appears to have suspected the aid of “The Bees.” * No doubt, this idea was the origin of that satirical Capriccio, which closed in a most fortunate pun—a literary caricature, where the doctor" is represented in the hands of Phalaris's attendants, who are putting him into the tyrant's bull, while Bentley exclaims, "I had rather be roasted than Boyled." See a fine scholar sunk by wit in Boyle! A Satire against Wit. qualities are represented as "tall, without shape or comeliness; large, without strength or proportion." His various erudition, as "armour patched up of a thousand incoherent pieces ;" his book, as "the sound" of that armour, "loud and dry, like that made by the fall of a sheet of lead from the roof of some steeple;" his haughty intrepidity, as "a vizor of brass, tainted by his breath, corrupted into copperas, nor wanted gall from the same fountain; so that, whenever provoked by anger or labour, an atramentous quality of most malignant nature was seen to distil from his lips." Wotton is "heavy-armed and slow of foot, lagging behind." They perish together in one ludicrous death. Boyle, in his celestial armour, by a stroke of his weapon, transfixes both "the lovers," "as a cook trusses a brace of woodcocks, with iron skewer piercing the tender sides of both. Joined in their lives, joined in their death, so closely joined, that Charon would mistake them both for one, and waft them over Styx for half his fare." Such is the candour of wit! The great qualities of an adversary, as in Bentley, are distorted into disgraceful attitudes; while the suspicious virtues of a friend, as in Boyle, not passed over in prudent silence, are ornamented with even spurious panegyric. Garth, catching the feeling of the time, sung"And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle." Posterity justly appreciates the volume of Bentley for its stores of ancient literature; and the author, for that peculiar sagacity in emending a corrupt text, which formed his distinguishing characteristic as a classical critic; and since his book but for this literary quarrel had never appeared, reverses the names in the verse of the Satirist. PARKER AND MARVELL. MARVELL the founder of " a newly-refined art of jeering buffoonery"—his knack of nick-naming his adversariesPARKER'S Portrait-PARKER Suddenly changes his principles-his declamatory style-MARVELL prints his anonymous letter as a motto to "The Rehearsal Transprosed"-describes him as "an At-all"-MARVELL'S ludicrous description 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. thing 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, considers 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 This is a curious remark of Wood's: how came raillery and satire to be considered as "a newlyrefined 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 Marvell, the under-secretary and the bosomfriend 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 mo--the "aureoli libelli," as one fondly calls his delled on his t. 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 some Randolph's Muses' Looking-glass. Scene 4. 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, Act 1, 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 apolo 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." 1 crabbed humorist describes "this pen-combat as brother-genius to Parker, by nicknaming him briskly managed on both sides; a jerking flirting" 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 factitious prototype. 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 Mar- Parker himself must have his portrait, and if vell, who remained inflexible to his seduction, he the likeness be justly hit off, some may be reminded deemed Marvell the best Prose Satirist of the age. of a resemblance. Mason applies the epithet of But Marvell had other qualities than the freest" Mitred Dullness" to him but although he was humour and the finest wit in this "newly-refined at length reduced to railing and to menaces, and art," which seems to have escaped these grave finally mortified into silence, this epithet does not critics-a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an suit so hardy and so active an adventurer. eloquence of invective, 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, may be considered as desperate a course, "withdraw from the town, and cease writing for some years*." : The secret history of Parker may be collected in Marvellt; 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 It 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 dry humour of honest Anthony, who paints like the Ostade of literary history. The celebrated work here to be noticed is Marvell's "Rehearsal Transprosed;" a title facetiously adopted from Bayes in "The Rehearsal Transposed" of the Duke of Buckingham. 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 gises 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 Marveli must have been considered as relishing morsels after such indigestible surfeits. So Burnet telis us. But the age of sectarism and thin gruel was losing all its coldness in the sunshine of the Restoration; and this "preciousest young man," from praying and caballing against episcopacy, suddenly acquainted the world in one of his dedications, that Dr. Ralph Bathurst had "rescued him from the chains and fetters of an unhappy education," and, without any intermediate apology, from a sullen sectarian turned a flaming highflyer for the " supreme dominion" of the church §. † See "The Rehearsal Transprosed, the second part," p. 76. 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. § Marvell admirably describes Parker's journey It is the after-conduct of Parker that throws this bold, haughty, and ambitious man, was one light on this rapid change. On speculative points of those who, having neither religion nor morality any man may be suddenly converted; for these for a casting weight, can easily fly off to opposite may depend on facts or arguments which might extremes; and whether a puritan or a bishop, never have occurred to him before. But when we must place his zeal to the same side of his we watch the weathercock chopping with the wind, religious ledger-that of the profits of barter ! so pliant to move, and so stiff when fixed,-when we observe this "preciousest grueller" clothed in purple, and equally hardy in the most opposite measures,—become a favourite with James II., and a furious advocate for arbitrary power; when we see him railing at and menacing those among whom he had committed as many extravagances as any of them ; can we hesitate to decide that to London at the Restoration, where " he spent a considerable time in creeping into all corners and companies, horoscoping up and down concerning the duration of the government." This term, so expressive of his political doubts, is from "Judicial Astrology," then a prevalent study. "Not considering anything as hest, but as most lasting and most profitable; and after having many times cast a figure, he at last satisfied himself that the episcopal government would endure as long as this king lived, and from thenceforwards cast about to find the highway to preferment. To do this, he daily enlarged not only his conversation but his conscience, and was made free of some of the town-vices; imagining, like Muleasses, King of Tunis (for I take witness that on all occasions I treat him rather above his quality than otherwise), that by hiding himself among the onions he should escape being traced by his perfumes." The narrative proceeds with a curious detail of ail his sycophantic attempts at seducing useful patrons, among whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Then began "those pernicious books," says Marvell," in which he first makes all that he will to be law, and then whatsoever is law, to be divinity." Parker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity," came at length to promulgate such violent principles as these, "He openly declares his submission to the government of a Nero and a Caligula, rather than suffer a dissolution of it." He says, "it is absolutely necessary to set up a more severe government over men's consciences and religious persuasions than over their vices and immoralities;" and that "men's vices and debaucheries may be more safely indulged than their consciences." Is it not difficult to imagine that this man had once been an Independent, the advocate for every congregation being independent of a bishop or a synod? Parker's father was a lawyer, and one of Oliver's most submissive sub-committee men, who 20 long pillaged the nation and spilled its blood, "not in the hot and military way (which dimi The quarrel between Parker and Marvell originated in a preface †, written by Parker, in which he had poured down his contempt and abuse on his old companions, the nonconformists. It was then Marvell clipped his wings with his "Rehearsal Transprosed;" his wit and humour were finely contrasted with Parker's extravagances, set off in his declamatory style; of which Marvell wittily describes "the volume and circumference of the periods, which, though he takes always to be his chiefest strength, yet, indeed, like too great a line, weakens the defence, and requires too many men to make it good." The tilt was now opened, and certain masqued knights appeared in the course; they attempted to grasp the sharp and polished weapon of Marvell, to turn it on himself. But Marvell, with malicious ingenuity, nishes always the offence), but in the cooler blood and sedentary execution of an high court of justice.” He wrote a very remarkable book (after he had been petitioned against for a misdemeanour) in defence of that usurped irregular state called "The Government of the People of England.” It had "a most hieroglyphical title" of several emblems: two hands joined, and beneath a sheaf of arrows, stuffed about with half-a-dozen mottoes, "enough," says Marvell, "to have supplied the mantlings and achievement of this (godly) family." An anecdote in this secret history of Parker is probably true. "He shortly afterwards did inveigh against his father's memory, and in his mother's presence, before witnesses, for a couple of whining fanatics."—Rehearsal Transprosed, second part, p. 75. This preface was prefixed to Bishop Bramhall's "Vindication of the Bishops from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery." As a specimen of what old Anthony calls " jerking flirting way of writing," I transcribe the titles of these answers which Marvell received. As Marvell had nicknamed Parker, Bayes, the quaint humour of one, entitled his reply, “ Rosemary and Bayes ;" another, "The Transproser Rehearsed, or the Fifth Act of Mr. Bayes's Play;" another, "Gregory Father Greybeard, with his Vizard off;" another formed "a Common-place Book out of the Rehearsal, digested under heads;" and, lastly, "Stoo him Bayes, or some Animadversions on the Humour of writing Rehearsals." Biog. Brit. p. 3055. This was the very Bartlemy-fair of wit! |