satires.

As a prose writer Marvell has many merits and one great fault. He has
fire and fancy and was the owner and master of a precise vocabulary well
fitted to clothe and set forth a well-reasoned and lofty argument. He
knew how to be both terse and diffuse, and can compress himself into a
line or expand over a paragraph. He has touches of a grave irony as well
as of a boisterous humour. He can tell an anecdote and elaborate a
parable. Swift, we know, had not only Butler's _Hudibras_ by heart, but
was also (we may be sure) a close student of Marvell's prose. His great
fault is a very common one. He is too long. He forgets how quickly a
reader grows tired. He is so interested in the evolutions of his own
mind that he forgets his audience. His interest at times seems as if it
were going to prove endless. It is the first business of an author to
arrest and then to retain the attention of the reader. To do this
requires great artifice.

Among the masters of English prose it would be rash to rank Marvell, who
was neither a Hooker nor a Taylor. None the less he was the owner of a
prose style which some people think the best prose style of all--that of
honest men who have something to say.

FOOTNOTES:

[229:1] "Indecently" is the doctor's own expression.

[231:1] See Hallam's _History of Literature_, vol. iv. pp. 433, 439.

INDEX

A

"_Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England_,"
180-1, 187;
quoted, 188.

Act of Uniformity, 143, 184.

Addison, 65.

Aitken, Mr., 47.

Amersham, 145.

Amsterdam, 59, 197.

Angier, Lord, 196.

_Appleton House_, 66.

Arlington, 185, 186.

_Ars Poetica_, 47.

Ashley, Lord, 120, 150, 185.

_Athenae Oxonienses_, 10.

Aubrey, 222.

Austin, John, 159.

_Autobiography_ (Clarendon), 136.

_Autobiography of Matthew Robinson_, 11 _n._

Axtell, Lieut.-Colonel, 28, 29.

B

_Baker's Chronicle_, 80.

Baker, Thomas, 24.

Bampfield, Thomas, 80.

Banda Islands, 127.

Barbadoes, 58.

Barnard, Edward, 95.

Barron, Richard, 64.

Baxter, Richard, 52, 93, 179.

Bedford, 162.

Bench Books of Hull, 223.

Bennet, Sir John, 195.

Berkeley, Charles, 115.

Berkenhead, Sir John, 191.

_Bermudas, The_, 66, 225, 230.

Besant, Sir Walter, 118 _n._

Bill for "the Rebuilding of London," 123, 124, 125, 126 _n._;
amended, 148.

Bill of Conventicles, 142, 146, 147, 148.

Bill of Subsidy, 193.

Bill of Test, 205.

Bill of