How this poetry was received, to whom and to how many it gave pleasure, we have not the means of knowing.  The book, like all other good books, had to take its chance.  Good poetry is never exactly unpopular—­its difficulty is to get a hearing, to secure a vogue.  I feel certain that from 1681 onwards many ingenuous souls read Eyes and Tears, The Bermudas, The Nymph complaining for the Death of her Fawn, To his Coy Mistress, Young Love, and The Garden with pure delight.  In 1699 the poet Pomfret, of whose Choice Dr. Johnson said in 1780, “perhaps no composition in our language has been oftener perused,” and who Southey in 1807 declared to be “the most popular of English poets”; in 1699, I say, this poet Pomfret says in a preface, sensibly enough, “to please everyone would be a New Thing, and to write so as to please no Body would be as New, for even Quarles and Wythers (sic) have their Admirers.”  So liable is the public taste to fluctuations and reversals, that to-day, though Quarles and Wither are not popular authors, they certainly number many more readers than Pomfret, Southey’s “most popular of English poets,” who has now, it is to be feared, finally disappeared even from the Anthologies.  But if Quarles and Wither had their admirers even in 1699, the poet Marvell, we may be sure, had his also.

Marvell had many poetical contemporaries—­five-and-twenty at least—­poets of mark and interest, to most of whom, as well as to some of his immediate predecessors, he stood, as I must suppose, in some degree of poetical relationship.  With Milton and Dryden no comparison will suggest itself, but with Donne and Cowley, with Waller and Denham, with Butler and the now wellnigh forgotten Cleveland, with Walker and Charles Cotton, with Rochester and Dorset, some resemblances, certain influences, may be found and traced.  From the order of his mind and his prose style, I should judge Marvell to have been both a reader and a critic of his contemporaries in verse and prose—­though of his criticisms little remains.  Of Butler he twice speaks with great respect, and his sole reference to the dead Cleveland is kindly.  Of Milton we know what he thought, whilst Aubrey tells us that he once heard Marvell say that the Earl of Rochester was the only man in England that had the true vein of satire.

Be these influences what they may or must have been, to us Marvell occupies, as a poet, a niche by himself.  A finished master of his art he never was.  He could not write verses like his friend Lovelace, or like Cowley’s Chronicle or Waller’s lines “On a Girdle.”  He had not the inexhaustible, astonishing (though tiresome) wit of Butler.  He is often clumsy and sometimes almost babyish.  One has frequently occasion to wonder how a man of business could allow himself to be tickled by such obvious straws as are too many of the conceits which give him pleasure.  To attribute all the