During the Commonwealth Marvell was content to be a civil servant.  He entertained for the Lord-Protector the same kind of admiration that such a loyalist as Chateaubriand could not help feeling for Napoleon.  Even Clarendon’s pedantic soul occasionally vibrates as he writes of Oliver, and compares his reputation in foreign courts with that of his own royal master.  When the Restoration came Marvell rejoiced.  Two old-established things had been destroyed by Cromwell—­Kings and Parliaments, and Marvell was glad to see them both back again in England.

Some verses of Marvell’s attributable to this period (1646-1650) show him keeping what may be called Royalist company.  With a dozen other friends of Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet and the author of two of the most famous stanzas in English verse, Marvell contributed some commendatory lines addressed to his “noble friend, Mr. Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems,” which appeared with the poems themselves in that year of fate, 1649.  “After the murder of the King,” says Anthony Wood, “Lovelace was set at liberty, and having by that time consumed all his estate, grew very melancholy, became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged clothes (whereas when he was in glory he wore cloth of gold and silver), and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of beggars and poorest of servants.”

Then it was that Lucasta made its first appearance.  When the fortunes of the gallant poet were at their lowest and never to revive, Marvell seizes the occasion to deplore the degeneracy of the times, a familiar theme with poets:—­

    “Our civil wars have lost the civic crown,
    He highest builds who with most art destroys,
    And against others’ fame his own employs.”

He then glances scornfully at the new Presbyterian censorship of the press:—­

    “The barbed censurers begin to look
    Like the grim consistory on thy book,
    And on each line cast a reforming eye,”

and suggests that Lucasta is in danger because in 1642 its author had been imprisoned by order of the House of Commons for presenting a petition from Kent which prayed for the restoration of the Book of Common Prayer.  This danger is, however, overcome by the ladies, who rise in arms to defend their favourite poet.

    “But when the beauteous Ladies came to know
    That their dear Lovelace was endangered so,
    Lovelace that thaw’d the most congealed breast,
    He who lov’d best and them defended best,
    They all in mutiny, though yet undrest,
    Sally’d.”

One of them challenged Marvell as to whether he had not been of the poet’s traducers, but he answered No!

    “O No, mistake not, I reply’d, for I
    In your defence or in his cause would die. 
    But he, secure of glory and of time,
    Above their envy or my aid doth climb. 
    Him, bravest men and fairest nymphs approve,
    His book in them finds Judgment, with you, Love.”