niversity, led the life of a scholar, with a
turn for business, and was known to many as an agreeable companion and a
lively wit. He was keenly interested in public affairs, and personally
acquainted with some men in great place, and for a year before
Cromwell's death he had been in a branch of the Civil Service; but of
the wear and tear, the strife and contention, of what are called
"practical politics" he knew nothing from personal experience.

Within a year of the Protector's death all this was changed and, for the
rest of his days, with but the shortest of occasional intervals, Andrew
Marvell led the life of an active, eager member of Parliament, knowing
all that was going on in the Chamber and hearing of everything that was
alleged to be going on in the Court; busily occupied with the affairs of
his constituents in Hull, and daily watching, with an increasingly heavy
heart and a bitter humour, the corruption of the times, the declension
of our sea-power, the growing shame of England, and what he believed to
be a dangerous conspiracy afoot for the undoing of the Reformation and
the destruction of the Constitution in both Church and State.

"Garden-poetry" could not be reared on such a soil as this. The age of
Cromwell and Blake was over. The remainder of Marvell's life (save so
far as personal friendship sweetened it) was spent in politics, public
business, in concocting roughly rhymed and bitter satirical poems, and
in the composition of prose pamphlets.

Through it all Marvell remained very much the man of letters, though one
with a great natural aptitude for business. His was always the critical
attitude. He was the friend of Milton and Harrington, of the political
philosophers who invented paper constitutions in the "Rota" Club, and of
the new race of men whose thoughts turned to Natural Science, and who
founded the Royal Society. Office he never thought of. He could have had
it had he chosen, for he was a man of mark, even of distinction, from
the first. Clarendon has told us how members of the House of Commons
"got on" in the Long Parliament of Charles the Second. It was full of
the king's friends, who ran out of the House to tell their shrewd master
the gossip of the lobbies, "commended this man and discommended another
who deserved better, and would many times, when His Majesty spoke well
of any man, ask His Majesty if he would give them leave to let that
person know how gracious His Majesty was to him, or