rds of panegyric are singularly well chosen. It
is a curious commentary upon the confused times of the Civil War and
Restoration that perhaps never before, and seldom, if ever, since, has
England contained so many clear heads and well-prepared breasts as it
did then. Small indeed is the influence of men of thought upon their
immediate surroundings.

The Lord Bradshaw, we know, had a home in Eton, and on the occasion of
one of Marvell's evidently frequent visits to the Oxenbridges, Milton
entrusted him with a letter to Bradshaw and a presentation copy of the
_Secunda defensio_. Marvell delivered both letter and book, and seems at
once to have informed the distinguished author that he had done so. But
alas for the vanity of the writing man! The sublime poet, who in his
early manhood had composed _Lycidas_, and was in his old age to write
_Paradise Lost_, demanded further and better particulars as to the
precise manner in which the chief of his office received, not only the
book, but the letter which accompanied it. Nobody is now left to think
much of Bradshaw, but in 1654 he was an excellent representative of the
class Carlyle was fond of describing as the _alors celebre_. Prompted by
this desire, Milton must have written to Marvell hinting, as he well
knew how to do, his surprise at the curtness of his friend's former
communication, and Marvell's reply to this letter has come down to us.
It is Marvell's glory that long before _Paradise Lost_ he recognised the
essential greatness of the blind secretary, and his letter is a fine
example of the mode of humouring a great man. Be it remembered, as we
read, that this letter was not addressed to one of the greatest names in
literature, but to a petulant and often peevish scholar, living of
necessity in great retirement, whose name is never once mentioned by
Clarendon, and about whom the voluminous Thurloe, who must have seen him
hundreds of times, has nothing to say except that he was "a blind man
who wrote Latin letters." Odder still, perhaps, Richard Baxter, whose
history of his own life and times is one of the most informing books in
the world, never so much as mentions the one and only man whose name
can, without any violent sense of unfitness, be given to the age about
which Baxter was writing so laboriously.

"HONOURED SIR,--I did not satisfie my self in the account I
gave you of presentinge your Book to my Lord, although it seemed to
me that I writ to you all w