and who
Southey in 1807 declared to be "the most popular of English poets"; in
1699, I say, this poet Pomfret says in a preface, sensibly enough, "to
please everyone would be a New Thing, and to write so as to please no
Body would be as New, for even Quarles and Wythers (_sic_) have their
Admirers." So liable is the public taste to fluctuations and reversals,
that to-day, though Quarles and Wither are not popular authors, they
certainly number many more readers than Pomfret, Southey's "most popular
of English poets," who has now, it is to be feared, finally disappeared
even from the Anthologies. But if Quarles and Wither had their admirers
even in 1699, the poet Marvell, we may be sure, had his also.

Marvell had many poetical contemporaries--five-and-twenty at
least--poets of mark and interest, to most of whom, as well as to some
of his immediate predecessors, he stood, as I must suppose, in some
degree of poetical relationship. With Milton and Dryden no comparison
will suggest itself, but with Donne and Cowley, with Waller and Denham,
with Butler and the now wellnigh forgotten Cleveland, with Walker and
Charles Cotton, with Rochester and Dorset, some resemblances, certain
influences, may be found and traced. From the order of his mind and his
prose style, I should judge Marvell to have been both a reader and a
critic of his contemporaries in verse and prose--though of his
criticisms little remains. Of Butler he twice speaks with great respect,
and his sole reference to the dead Cleveland is kindly. Of Milton we
know what he thought, whilst Aubrey tells us that he once heard Marvell
say that the Earl of Rochester was the only man in England that had the
true vein of satire.

Be these influences what they may or must have been, to us Marvell
occupies, as a poet, a niche by himself. A finished master of his art he
never was. He could not write verses like his friend Lovelace, or like
Cowley's _Chronicle_ or Waller's lines "On a Girdle." He had not the
inexhaustible, astonishing (though tiresome) wit of Butler. He is often
clumsy and sometimes almost babyish. One has frequently occasion to
wonder how a man of business could allow himself to be tickled by such
obvious straws as are too many of the conceits which give him pleasure.
To attribute all the conceits of this period to the influence of Dr.
Donne is but a poor excuse after all. The worst thing that can be said
against poetry is that there is so much tedium in it.