t 1645. I can give no other date during the
whole four years. This, our only date, rests upon an assumption. In
Marvell's earliest satirical poem he gives an account of a visit he paid
in Rome to the unlucky poetaster Flecknoe, who was not in Rome until
1645. If, therefore, the poem records an actual visit, it follows that
the author of the poem was in Rome at the same time. It is not very
near, but it is as near as we can get.

Richard Flecknoe was an Irish priest of blameless life, with a passion
for scribbling and for printing. His exquisite reason for both these
superfluous acts is worth quoting:--

"I write chiefly to avoid idleness, and print to avoid the imputation
(of idleness), and as others do it to live after they are dead, I do
it only not to be thought dead whilst I am alive."[20:1]

Such frankness should have disarmed ridicule, but somehow or another
this amiable man came to be regarded as the type of a dull author, and
his name passed into a proverb for stupidity, so much so that when
Dryden in 1682 was casting about how best to give pain to Shadwell, he
devised the plan of his famous satire, "MacFlecknoe," where in biting
verse he describes Flecknoe (who was happily dead) as an aged Prince--

"Who like Augustus young
Was called to empire and had governed long;
In prose and verse was owned, without dispute,
Through all the realms of nonsense absolute."

Dryden goes on to picture the aged Flecknoe,

"pondering which of all his sons was fit
To reign and wage immortal war with Wit,"

and fixing on Shadwell.

"Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity:
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense."

Thus has it come about that Flecknoe, the Irish priest, whom Marvell
visited in his Roman garret in 1645, bears a name ever memorable in
literature.

Marvell's own poem, though eclipsed by the splendour of Glorious John's
resounding lines, has an interest of its own as being, in its roughly
humorous way, a forerunner of the "Dunciad" and "Grub Street"
literature, by which in sundry moods 'tis "pleasure to be bound." It
describes seeking out the poetaster in his lodging "three staircases
high," at the sign of the Pelican, in a room so small that it seemed "a
coffin set in