This correspondence, which if we include in it, as we well may, the letters to the Worshipful Society of Masters and Pilots of the Trinity House in Hull, numbers upwards of 350 letters, and with but one considerable gap (from July 1663 to October 1665) covers the whole period of Marvell’s membership, is, I believe, unique in our public records.  The letters are preserved at Hull, where I hope care is taken to preserve them from the autograph hunter and the autograph thief.  Captain Thompson printed a great part of this correspondence in 1776, and Mr. Grosart gave the world the whole of it in the second volume of his edition of Marvell’s complete works.

An admission may as well be made at once.  This correspondence is not so interesting as it might have been expected to prove.  Marvell did not write letters for his biographer, nor to instruct posterity, nor to serve any party purpose, nor even to exhibit honest emotion, but simply to tell his employers, whose wages he took, what was happening at Westminster.  He kept his reflections either to himself or for his political broadsheets, and indeed they were seldom of the kind it would have been safe to entrust to the post.

Good Mr. Grosart fusses and frets terribly over Marvell’s astonishing capacity for chronicling in sombre silence every kind of legislative abomination.  It is at times a little hard to understand it, for Hull was what may be called a Puritan place.  No doubt caution dictated some of the reticence—­but the reserve of Marvell’s character is one of the few traits of his personality that has survived.  He was a satirist, not an enthusiast.

I will give the first letter in extenso to serve as a specimen, and a very favourable one, of the whole correspondence:—­

“Nov. 17, 1660.

“GENTLEMEN, MY WORTHY FRIENDS,—­Although during the necessary absence of my partner, Mr. Ramsden, I write with but halfe a penn, and can scarce perswade myselfe to send you so imperfect an account of your own and the publick affairs, as I needs must for want of his assistance; yet I had rather expose mine own defects to your good interpretation, then excuse thereby a totall neglect of my duty, and that trust which is divided upon me.  At my late absence out of Town I had taken such order that if you had commanded me any thing, I might soon haue received it, and so returned on purpose to this place to haue obeyed you.  But hearing nothing of that nature howeuer, I was present the first day of the Parliament’s sitting, and tooke care to write to Mr. Maior what work we had cut out.  Since when, we have had little new, but onely been making a progresse in those things I then mentioned.  There is yet brought in an Act in which of all others your corporation is the least concerned:  that is, where wives shall refuse to cohabit with their husbands, that in such case the husband shall not be liable to pay any debts which she may run into,