Marvell’s famous Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland in 1650 has a curious bibliographical interest.  So far as we can tell, it was first published in 1776.  When it was composed we do not know.  At Nunappleton House Oliver was not a persona grata in 1650, for he had no sooner come back from Ireland than he had stepped into the shoes of the Lord-General Fairfax; and there were those, Lady Fairfax, I doubt not, among the number, who believed that the new Lord-General thought it was high time he should be where Fairfax’s “scruple” at last put him.  We may be sure Cromwell’s character was dissected even more than it was extolled at Nunappleton.  The famous Ode is by no means a panegyric, and its true hero is the “Royal actor,” whom Cromwell, so the poem suggests, lured to his doom.  It is not likely that the Ode was composed after Marvell had left Nunappleton, though it may have been so before he went there.  There is an old untraceable tradition that Marvell was among the crowd that saw the king die.  What deaths have been witnessed, and with what strange apparent apathy, by the London crowd!  But for this tradition one’s imagination would trace to Lady Fairfax the most famous of the stanzas.

But to return to the history of the Ode.  In 1776 Captain Edward Thompson, a connection of the Marvell family and a versatile sailor with a passion for print, which had taken some odd forms of expression, produced by subscription in three quarto volumes the first collected edition of Andrew Marvell’s works, both verse and prose.  Such an edition had been long premeditated by Thomas Hollis, one of the best friends literature had in the eighteenth century.  It was Hollis who gave to Sidney Sussex College the finest portrait in existence of Oliver Cromwell.  Hollis collected material for an edition of Marvell with the aid of Richard Barron, an early editor of Milton’s prose works, and of Algernon Sidney’s Discourse concerning Government.  Barron, however, lost zeal as the task proceeded, and complained justly enough “of a want of anecdotes,” and as the printer, the well-known and accomplished Bowyer, doubted the wisdom of the undertaking, it was allowed to drop.  Barron died in 1766, and Hollis in 1774, but the collections made by the latter passed into the hands of Captain Thompson, who, with the assistance of Mr. Robert Nettleton, a grandson of one of Marvell’s sisters, at once began to get his edition ready.  On Nettleton’s death his “Marvell” papers came into Thompson’s hands, and among them was, to quote the captain’s own words, “a volume of Mr. Marvell’s poems, some written with his own hand and the rest copied by his order.”

The Horatian Ode was in this volume, and was printed from it in Thompson’s edition of 1776.

What has become of this manuscript book?  It has disappeared—­destroyed, so we are led to believe, in a fit of temper by the angry and uncritical sea-captain.