as any
single member of it remained alive.

Marvell was not a "Rumper," but on the 2nd of April 1660 he was again
elected for Hull to sit in what is usually called the Convention
Parliament. John Ramsden was returned at the head of the poll with 227
votes, Marvell receiving 141. There were four defeated candidates.

With this Convention Parliament begins Marvell's remarkable
correspondence, on fine folio sheets of paper, with the corporation of
Hull, whose faithful servant he remained until death parted them in
1678.

This correspondence, which if we include in it, as we well may, the
letters to the Worshipful Society of Masters and Pilots of the Trinity
House in Hull, numbers upwards of 350 letters, and with but one
considerable gap (from July 1663 to October 1665) covers the whole
period of Marvell's membership, is, I believe, unique in our public
records. The letters are preserved at Hull, where I hope care is taken
to preserve them from the autograph hunter and the autograph thief.
Captain Thompson printed a great part of this correspondence in 1776,
and Mr. Grosart gave the world the whole of it in the second volume of
his edition of Marvell's complete works.

An admission may as well be made at once. This correspondence is not so
interesting as it might have been expected to prove. Marvell did not
write letters for his biographer, nor to instruct posterity, nor to
serve any party purpose, nor even to exhibit honest emotion, but simply
to tell his employers, whose wages he took, what was happening at
Westminster. He kept his reflections either to himself or for his
political broadsheets, and indeed they were seldom of the kind it would
have been safe to entrust to the post.

Good Mr. Grosart fusses and frets terribly over Marvell's astonishing
capacity for chronicling in sombre silence every kind of legislative
abomination. It is at times a little hard to understand it, for Hull was
what may be called a Puritan place. No doubt caution dictated some of
the reticence--but the reserve of Marvell's character is one of the few
traits of his personality that has survived. He was a satirist, not an
enthusiast.

I will give the first letter _in extenso_ to serve as a specimen, and a
very favourable one, of the whole correspondence:--

"_Nov. 17, 1660._

"GENTLEMEN, MY WORTHY FRIENDS,--Although during the necessary absence
of my partner, Mr. Ramsden, I wr