ther that thou hast borne
me a man of strife and contention."

Marvell's chief prose work, the two parts of _The Rehearsal
Transprosed_, is a very long pamphlet indeed, composed by way of reply
to certain publications of Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford.
Controversially Marvell's book was a great success.[152:1] It amused the
king, delighted the wits, was welcomed, if not read, by the pious folk
whose side it espoused, whilst its literary excellence was sufficient to
win, in after years, the critical approval of Swift, whose style, though
emphatically his own, bears traces of its master having given, I will
not say his days and nights, but certainly some profitable hours, to the
study of Marvell's prose.

Biographers of controversialists seldom do justice to the other side.
Possibly they do not read it, and Parker has been severely handled by my
predecessors. He was not an honour to his profession, being, perhaps, as
good or as bad a representative of the seamy side of State Churchism as
there is to be found. He was the son of a Puritan father, and whilst at
Wadham lived by rule, fasting and praying. He took his degree in the
early part of 1659, and migrating to Trinity came under the influence of
Dr. Bathurst, then Senior Fellow, to whom, so he says in one of his
dedications, "I owe my first rescue from the chains and fetters of an
unhappy education."[152:2] Anything Parker did he did completely, and
we next hear of him in London in 1665, a nobleman's chaplain, setting
the table in a roar by making fun of his former friends, "a mimical way
of drolling upon the puritans." "He followed the town-life, haunted the
best companies and, to polish himself from any pedantic roughness, he
read and saw the plays with much care and more preparing than most of
the auditory." In 1667 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon, a very
mundane person indeed, made Parker his chaplain, and three years later
Archdeacon of Canterbury. He reached many preferments, so that, says
Marvell, "his head swell'd like any bladder with wind and vapour." He
had an active pen and a considerable range of subject. In 1670 he
produced "A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie wherein the Authority of
the Civil Magistrate over the Consciences of Subjects in Matters of
External Religion is Asserted; The Mischiefs and Inconveniences of
Toleration are represented and all Pretenses pleaded in behalf of
_Liberty of Conscience_ are fully answered." Some