ic member of
Parliament, who refused in his poverty the Lord-Treasurer Danby's
proffered bribe, became a character in history before the exquisite
quality of his garden-poetry was recognised. There was a cult for
Liberty in the middle of the eighteenth century, and Marvell's name was
on the list of its professors. Wordsworth's sonnet has preserved this
tradition for us.

"Great men have been among us; hands that penn'd
And tongues that utter'd wisdom, better none:
The later Sydney, Marvell, Harrington."

In 1726 Thomas Cooke printed an edition of Marvell's works which
contains the poetry that was in the folio of 1681, and in 1772 Cooke's
edition was reprinted by T. Davies. It was probably Davies's edition
that Charles Lamb, writing to Godwin on Sunday, 14th December 1800, says
he "was just going to possess": a notable addition to Lamb's library,
and an event in the history of the progress of Marvell's poetical
reputation. Captain Thompson's edition, containing the _Horatian Ode_
and other pieces, followed in 1776. In the great Poetical Collection of
the Booksellers (1779-1781) which they improperly[229:1] called
"Johnson's _Poets_" (improperly, because the poets were, with four
exceptions, the choice not of the biographer but of the booksellers,
anxious to retain their imaginary copyright), Marvell has no place. Mr.
George Ellis, in his _Specimens_ of the early English poets first
published in 1803, printed from Marvell _Daphne and Chloe_ (in part) and
_Young Love_. When Mr. Bowles, that once famous sonneteer, edited Pope
in 1806, he, by way of belittling Pope, quoted two lines from Marvell,
now well known, but unfamiliar in 1806:--

"And through the hazels thick espy
The hatching throstle's shining eye."

He remarked upon them, "the last circumstance is new, highly poetical,
and could only have been described by one who was a real lover of
nature and a witness of her beauties in her most solitary retirement."
On this Mark Pattison makes the comment that the lines only prove that
Marvell when a boy went bird-nesting (_Essays_, vol. ii. p. 374), a
pursuit denied to Pope by his manifold infirmities. The poet Campbell,
in his _Specimens_ (1819), gave an excellent sketch of Marvell's life,
and selected _The Bermudas_, _The Nymph and Fawn_, and _Young Love_.
Then came, fresh from talk with Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, with his _Select
Poets_ (1825), which contains the _Horatian Ode_, _Bermudas_, _To his
C