ed to write poetry, in which no one appears
to have suspected the aid of "The Bees"--

"See a fine scholar sunk by wit in Boyle!
After his foolish rhymes, both friends and foes
Conclude they know _who did not write his prose_."
_A Satire against Wit._

PARKER AND MARVELL.

MARVELL the founder of "a newly-refined art of jeering
buffoonery"--his knack of nicknaming his adversaries--PARKER'S
Portrait--PARKER suddenly changes his principles--his declamatory
style--MARVELL prints his anonymous letter as a motto to "The
Rehearsal Transprosed"--describes him as an "At-all"--MARVELL'S
ludicrous description of the whole posse of answers summoned
together by PARKER--MARVELL'S cautious allusion to MILTON--his
solemn invective against PARKER--anecdote of MARVELL and
PARKER--PARKER retires after the second part of "The Rehearsal
Transprosed"--The Recreant, reduced to silence, distils his secret
vengeance in a posthumous libel.

One of the legitimate ends of satire, and one of the proud triumphs of
genius, is to unmask the false zealot; to beat back the haughty spirit
that is treading down all; and if it cannot teach modesty, and raise a
blush, at least to inflict terror and silence. It is then that the
satirist does honour to the office of the executioner.

As one whose whip of steel can with a lash
Imprint the characters of shame so deep,
Even in the brazen forehead of proud Sin,
That not eternity shall wear it out.[307]

The quarrel between PARKER and MARVELL is a striking example of the
efficient powers of genius, in first humbling, and then annihilating,
an unprincipled bravo, who had placed himself at the head of a
faction.

Marvell, the under-secretary and the bosom-friend of Milton, whose
fancy he has often caught in his verse, was one of the greatest wits
of the luxuriant age of Charles II.; he was a master in all the arts
of ridicule; and his inexhaustible spirit only required some permanent
subject to have rivalled the causticity of Swift, whose style, in
neatness and vivacity, seems to have been modelled on his.[308] But
Marvell placed the oblation of genius on a temporary altar, and the
sacrifice sunk with it; he wrote to the times, and with the times his
writings have passed away; yet something there is incorruptible in
wit, and wherever its salt has fallen, that part is still preserved.

Such