n of his personal character.

A somewhat solitary man he would appear to have been, though fond of
occasional jollity. He lived alone in lodgings, and was much immersed in
business, about a good deal of which we know nothing except that it took
him abroad. His death was sudden, and when three years afterwards the
first edition of his poems made its appearance, it was prefaced by a
certificate signed "Mary Marvell," to the effect that everything in the
book was printed "according to the copies of my late dear husband."
Until after Marvell's death we never hear of Mrs. Marvell, and with this
signed certificate she disappears. In a series of Lives of Poets' Wives
it would be hard to make much of Mrs. Andrew Marvell. For different but
still cogent reasons it is hard to write a life of her famous husband.

Andrew Marvell was born at Winestead in Holdernesse, on Easter Eve, the
31st of March 1621, in the Rectory House, the elder Marvell, also
Andrew, being then the parson of the parish. No fitter birthplace for a
garden-poet can be imagined. Roses still riot in Winestead; the
fruit-tree roots are as mossy as in the seventeenth century. At the
right season you may still

"Through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye."

Birds, fruits and flowers, woods, gardens, meads, and rivers still make
the poet's birthplace lovely.

"Loveliness, magic, and grace,
They are here--they are set in the world!
They abide! and the finest of souls
Has not been thrilled by them all,
Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.
The poet who sings them may die,
But they are immortal and live,
For they are the life of the world."

Holdernesse was not the original home of the Marvells, who would seem to
have been mostly Cambridgeshire folk, though the name crops up in other
counties. Whether Cambridge "men" of a studious turn still take long
walks I do not know, but "some vast amount of years ago" it was
considered a pleasant excursion, either on foot or on a hired steed,
from Cambridge to Meldreth, where the Elizabethan manor-house, long
known as "the Marvells'," agreeably embodied the tradition that here it
was that the poet's father was born in 1586. The Church Registers have
disappeared. Proof is impossible. That there were Marvells in the
neighbourhood is certain. The famous Cambridge antiquary, William Cole,
perhaps the greatest of all our collectors, has included among his
copies