Philip Meadows, officiate in the employment of Mr.
Meadows under Mr. Secretary [Thurloe], and that a salary of 200 merks
_per annum_ be allowed him for the same."[1] Whether this Mr.
Sterry was the preacher Mr. Peter Sterry, already employed and
salaried as one of the Chaplains to the Council, or only a relative
of his, I have not ascertained; but it is of the less consequence
because the appointment did not take effect. The person actually
appointed was MR. ANDREW MARVELL at last. We say "at last," for had
he not been recommended for the precise post by Milton four years and
a half before under the Rump Government? Milton may have helped now
to bring him in, or it may have been done by Oliver himself in
recognition of Marvell's merits in his tutorship of young Dutton and
of his Latin and English Oliverian verses. There seems to be no
record of Marvell's appointment in the Order Books; but he tells us
himself it was in the year 1657. "As to myself," he wrote in 1672,
"I never had any, not the remotest, relation to public matters, nor
correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year
1657, when indeed I entered into an employment for which I was not
altogether improper." When Marvell wrote this, he was oblivious of
some particulars; for, though it is true that he was in no public
employment under the Protectorate till 1657, it can hardly be said
that he had not "the remotest relation" till then to public matters,
nor any "correspondence with the persons then predominant." Enough
for us that, from the year he specifies, and precisely from September
in that year, he was Milton's colleague in the Foreign or Latin
Secretaryship. "_Colleague_" we may call him, for his salary was
to be L200 a year (not 200 merks, as had been proposed for Sterry),
the same as Milton's was, and the same as Meadows's had been; and yet
not _quite_ "colleague," inasmuch as Milton's L200 a year was a
life-pension, and also inasmuch as, in stepping into Meadows's place,
Marvell became one of Thurloe's subordinates in the office, while
something of the original honorary independence of the Foreign
Secretaryship still encircled Milton.--Just as Marvell had for some
time been wistful after a place in the Council Office, suitable for a
scholar and Latinist, so there was another person now in the same
condition of outside waiting and occasional looking-in. "Received
then of the Right honble. Mr. Secretary Thurloe the sume of fifty
pounds: