“I gather three things.

“(1) That he was a man of a very brave, fearlessly outspoken character.  Some of his practical applications in his sermons before the Magistrates are daring in their directness of reproof, and melting in their wistfulness of entreaty.

   “(2) That he was a well-read man.  His Sermons are as full of
   classical and patristic allusions and pat sayings from the most
   occult literatures as even Bishop Andrewes.

“(3) That he was a man of tireless activity.  Besides the two offices named, he became head of one of the Great Hospitals of the Town (Charter House), and in an address to the Governors placed before them a prescient and statesmanlike plan for the better management of its revenues, and for the foundation of a Free Public Library to be accessible to all.”

When at a later day, and in the midst of a fierce controversy, Andrew Marvell wrote of the clergy as “the reserve of our Christianity,” he doubtless had such men as his father in his mind and memory.

It was at the old Grammar School of Hull, and with his father as his Orbilius, that Marvell was initiated into the mysteries of the Latin grammar, and was, as he tells us, put to his

      “Montibus, inquit, erunt; et erant submontibus illis;
      Risit Atlantiades; et me mihi, perfide, prodis? 
      Me mihi prodis? ait.

   “For as I remember this scanning was a liberal art that we learn’d at
   Grammar School, and to scan verses as he does the Author’s prose
   before we did or were obliged to understand them."[8:2]

Irrational methods have often amazingly good results, and the Hull Grammar School provided its head-master’s only son with the rudiments of learning, thus enabling him to become in after years what John Milton himself, the author of that terrible Treatise on Education addressed to Mr. Hartlibb, affirmed Andrew Marvell to be in a written testimonial, “a scholar, and well-read in the Latin and Greek authors.”

Attached to the Grammar School there was “a great garden,” renowned for its wall-fruit and flowers; so by leaving Winestead behind, our “garden-poet,” that was to be, was not deprived of inspiration.

Apart from these meagre facts, we know nothing of Marvell’s boyhood at Hull.  His clerical foe, Dr. Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, writes contemptuously of “an hunger-starved whelp of a country vicar,” and in another passage, which undoubtedly refers to Marvell, he speaks of “an unhappy education among Boatswains and Cabin-boys,” whose unsavoury phrases, he goes on to suggest, Marvell picked up in his childhood.  But truth need not be looked for in controversial pages.  The best argument for a married clergy is to be found, for Englishmen at all events, in the sixty-seven volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, where are recorded the services rendered to religion, philosophy, poetry, justice, and the empire by the “whelps” of many a country vicar.  Parsons’ wives may sometimes be trying and hard to explain, but an England without the sons of her clergy would be shorn of half her glory.