asily have
escaped, in twenty-four hours, from the jaws of the grave and the
disease: and so burning with anger, I informed the doctor, when he
told me this story without any sense of shame."

Marvell was buried on the 18th of August, "under the pews in the south
side of St. Giles's Church in the Fields, under the window wherein is
painted on glass a red lion." So writes the invaluable Aubrey, who tells
us he had the account from the sexton who made the grave.

In 1678 St. Giles's Church was a brick structure built by Laud. The
present imposing church was built on the site of the old one in 1730-34.

In 1774 Captain Thompson, so he tells us, "visited the grand mausoleum
under the church of St. Giles, to search for the coffin in which Mr.
Marvell was placed: in this vault were deposited upwards of a thousand
bodies, but I could find no plate of an earlier date than 1722; I do
therefore suppose the new church is built upon the former burial place."

The poet's grand-nephew, Mr. Robert Nettleton, in 1764 placed on the
north side of the present church, upon a black marble slab, a long
epitaph, still to be seen, recording the fact that "near to this place
lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esquire." At no great distance from
this slab is the tombstone, recently brought in from the graveyard
outside, of _Georgius Chapman, Poeta_, a fine Roman monument, prepared
by the care and at the cost of the poet's friend, Inigo Jones. Still
left exposed, in what is now a doleful garden (not at all Marvellian),
is the tombstone of Richard Penderel of Boscobel, one of the five yeomen
brothers who helped Charles to escape after Worcester. Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, in 1648, and Shirley the dramatist, in 1666, had been carried
to the same place of sepulture.

Aubrey describes Marvell "as of middling stature, pretty strong-set,
roundish faced, cherry-cheeked, hazell eye, brown hair. He was, in his
conversation, very modest, and of very few words. Though he loved wine,
he would never drink hard in company, and was wont to say that he would
not play the good fellow in any man's company in whose hands he would
not trust his life. He kept bottles of wine at his lodgings, and many
times he would drink liberally by himself and to refresh his spirit and
exalt his muse. James Harrington (author of _Oceana_) was his intimate
friend; J. Pell, D.D., was one of his acquaintances. He had not a
general acquaintance."

Dr. Pell, one may remark,