MARVELL 



MARX 



71 





Plot panic bad just set in, and. being a marked 

 man, lie was supposed to have been made away 

 with by poison. His death, however, was really 

 due to natural causes, an attack of tertian ague 

 and ' the ignorance of an old conceited doctor ' 

 ( Morton's Pyntoloyia, 1692: Athene um. No. 2419). 

 He was buried in St Giles's-in-the-Fields, ' under 

 ye pewes in ye south side,' according to Aubrey. 



Marvell's claims to remembrance are concisely 

 gummed up when he is described as ' poet, 

 patriot, and friend of Milton,' but the second 

 is the title by which he is best known. The 

 refusal of a coarse bribe has sent him down to 

 posterity as a prodigy of patriotic virtue, and the 

 met is as severe a satire on the corruption of his 

 time as anything in his own writings. Attempts 

 have been made to tone down popular admiration 

 in his case, by suggestions, for example, of intem- 

 perate habits, founded on a casual remark of 

 Aubrey's, though it is clear from the context that 

 Aubrey meant nothing of the kind ; and a stain on 

 his character has been found in the grossness and 

 virulence of the political satires that liear his 

 name. But we should rememl>er that, except in 

 one or two cases, we have no right to assume that 

 he was the author of these things. The Advice to 

 a Painter is vouched for by Aubrey, but for the 

 n't we have no letter authority than the printer 

 of Poems on Affairs of State ( 1689), a man with a 

 muck-rake scraping together the scurrilities of the 

 two post reigns : and, as he has put the name to two 

 or three pieces Marvel! did not write, he may have 

 put it to more. But, even if Marvel! did write 

 them, we must recollect that it was a coarse age, 

 and that to be effective he had to vise its language 

 and ideas. Because he served under Cromwell 

 and was a friend of Milton, it is often assumed 

 that he was a Roundhead ;in<1 a republican, but 

 bis ci-.vn words belie the assumption. The royalist 

 fervour of his youth cooled, and he admired Crom- 

 well localise he put down anarchy with a strong 

 hand, and ' made England great and his enemies 

 tremble," but he was no admirer of Cromwell's 

 rule. He was a constitutionalist before all things. 

 In his prose tracts and his letters to his constituents, 

 he makes it clear that if Charles could have kept 

 might he would have had no sturdier supporter 

 than Andrew Marvell, but even in his despair his 

 attitude is expressed in his own noble line, "Tig 

 godlike good to save a falling king.' .Marvell's 

 works are divided by the Restoration into two 

 very distinct groups. After 1660 his pen wag 

 given up to politics, except when his friendship 

 for Milton drew from him the lines prefixed to the 

 second edition of purrofixe Lost. In ll>72 73 lie 

 wrote the Rekrtimnl '/'ntux/ims'i! in answer to 

 Parker, afterwards liisliop of Oxford, who had 

 pome forward us the advocate of religions intoler- 

 ance : and in 1676 a similar work. Mr Smirke, or 

 the Dir/Hi- in Marie, in reply to Turner, Master 

 of St John's, Cambridge, to which he added a 

 on General Councils. In 1677 

 his most important tractate, the Account of 

 the Groii-fh rif Popery and Arbitrary Govfrnnn ut, 

 int.',l at Amsterdam, the title-page says; 

 in HITS \i\< defence of the Nonconformist John 

 Howe; and to complete the list his voluminous 

 correspondence with his constituents should lie 

 added. His poetry wag printed in folio in 1681 

 with a preface by his widow, which Cooke, the 

 editor of a new edition in 1726, denounced as 

 the work of an impostor, an aspersion disposed of 

 by the letters of administration granted in 1679 to 

 Miin-i-n, rrlii-tir. As a poet Marvell lielongg 

 altogether to the pre- Restoration period. Most of 

 his jioems seem to have licen written during his 

 r.'-i'l.-iH-c with Fairfax, and all, clearly, before he 

 entered public life. ' A witty delicacy,' as Lamb 



called it, and a certain classical turn of expression 

 that betrays the scholar, give a peculiar character 

 to his poetry, but unquestionably his distinguish- 

 ing characteristic as a poet is his genuine, hearty 

 enjoyment of nature, of which, perhaps, no Eng- 

 lish poet between Chaucer and \Vordsworth had 

 so large a share. 



The only complete and accurate edition of Marvell's 

 works is that of Dr Grosart, in 4 vols. 1872-74. The 

 edition by Captain Thompson ( 3 vols. 4to, 1776 ) printed 

 for the first time the poems on Cromwell, in one of 

 which occurs the famous passage about the death of 

 Charles I. For Thompson's absurd claim of poems by 

 Addisoii, Mallet, and Dr Watts, see the Cornhili for ISti'J. 

 There is an admirable selection by G. A. Aitkeu (1892). 



.tl:ir>t ;ir. See JODHPUR. 



M.irx. KARL, the founder of international 

 socialism, was born at Treves, 5th May 1818. His 

 father was a lawyer in that town, and the young 

 Marx was sent to the universities of Bonn and 

 Berlin to study with a view to the same profession ; 

 but he seems really to have devoted his time to 

 history and philosophy. He was apparently a 

 disciple of Hegel, and he had for a time the intent ion 

 to settle at Bonn as a lecturer on philosophy. 

 Marx, however, soon gave up the idea of following 

 an academic career, and in 1842 undertook the 

 editorship of the democratic organ, the Rhenish 

 Gazette. His experience on the journal convinced 

 him that his economic knowledge required enlarg- 

 ing ; and after his marriage he proceeded in 1843 to 

 Paris, the headquarters of revolutionary economics. 

 In the Deutsch-Frtinzo&ische Julirlnicher he began 

 that course of literary activity which, varied by 

 agitation, constituted the work of his life. Expelled 

 from France in 1845, he settled in Brussels, where 

 amongst other productions he wrote his attack on 

 Proudhon'g Philosophic de la Miscre, entitled 

 Mi sere tie la Philosophie. 



But his chief work at Brussels was the reorganis- 

 ing, along with Fr. Engels, of the Communist 

 League, for which he wrote the famous Manifesto 

 (see INTERNATIONAL). In 1848 Marx took an 

 active part in the revolutionary movement on the 

 Rhine, and after its failure finally settled in London 

 in 1849. Here at the British Museum he acquired 

 his marvellous knowledge of economic literature 

 and of the economic development of modern Europe. 

 The early fruits of his labour appeared in a work, 

 Zur Kritil; ili-r imlitisc/ien Oelconomie (1859), the 

 theories of which were, however, carried forward 

 into the first volume of Ids Kapital ( 1867). Before 

 that year Marx had, in 1864, resumed his work as 

 agitator. He had the foremost part in founding 

 and directing the International, and after the death 

 of Lassalle he won practical control of the social- 

 democratic movement in Germany. He died in 

 London, 14th March 1883. 



Marx's works leave ns in no doubt that he 

 wag a man of extraordinary knowledge, which 

 he liandled with masterly skill. To one who has 

 taken the pains to understand his terminology 

 his style is lucid and powerful, though also some- 

 times tedious owing to the minuteness of his 

 exposition ; and the march of thought is varied by 

 humour, unsparing invective, and flashes of light from 

 the most unexpected quarters. Since the beginning 

 of literature few books have l>een written like the 

 first volume of Marx's Kapital. It is preinatuie 

 to ofl'er any definitive judgment on his work as 

 revolutionary thinker and agitator, because that is 

 still very far from completion. There need, how- 

 ever, be no hesitation in saying that he, incompar- 

 ably more than any other man, has influenced the 

 kftbonr movement all over the civilised world ; his 

 theories have in a thousand ways already pene- 

 trated the different strata of society, even the 

 highest, but most of all the working-classes. It 



