are the vigour and fertility of Marvell's writings, that our old
Chronicler of Literary History, Anthony Wood, considers him as the
founder of "the then newly-refined art (though much in mode and
fashion almost ever since) of sportive and jeering buffoonery;"[309]
and the crabbed humorist describes "this pen-combat as briskly managed
on both sides; a jerking flirting way of writing entertaining the
reader, by seeing two such right cocks of the game so keenly engaging
with sharp and dangerous weapons."--Burnett calls Marvell "the
liveliest droll of the age, who writ in a burlesque strain, but with
so peculiar and entertaining a conduct, that from the king to the
tradesman, his books were read with great pleasure." Charles II. was a
more polished judge than these uncouth critics; and, to the credit of
his impartiality,--for that witty monarch and his dissolute court
were never spared by Marvell, who remained inflexible to his
seduction--he deemed Marvell the best prose satirist of the age. But
Marvell had other qualities than the freest humour and the finest wit
in this "newly-refined art," which seems to have escaped these grave
critics--a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an eloquence of invective,
that awes one with the spirit of the modern Junius,[310] and may give
some notion of that more ancient satirist, whose writings are said to
have so completely answered their design, that, after perusal, their
victim hanged himself on the first tree; and in the present case,
though the delinquent did not lay violent hands on himself, he did
what, for an author, may be considered as desperate a course,
"withdraw from the town, and cease writing for some years."[311]

The celebrated work here to be noticed is Marvell's "Rehearsal
Transprosed;" a title facetiously adopted from Bayes in "The Rehearsal
Transposed" of the Duke of Buckingham. It was written against the
works and the person of Dr. Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of
Oxford, whom he designates under the character of Bayes, to denote the
incoherence and ridiculousness of his character. Marvell had a
peculiar knack of calling names,--it consisted in appropriating a
ludicrous character in some popular comedy, and dubbing his
adversaries with it. In the same spirit he ridiculed Dr. Turner, of
Cambridge, a brother-genius to Parker, by nicknaming him "Mr. Smirk,
the Divine in Mode," the name of the Chaplain in Etherege's "Man of
Mode," and thus, by a stroke of the pen, conve