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.”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.
Marvell’s boyhood seems to have been surrounded with the things that most make for a child’s happiness. A sensible, affectionate, humorous, religious father, occupying a position of authority, and greatly respected, a mother and three elder sisters to make much of his bright wit and early adventures, a comfortable yet simple home, and an atmosphere of piety, learning, and good fellowship. What more is wanted, or can be desired? The “Boatswains” and “Cabin-boys” of Bishop Parker’s fancy were in the neighbourhood, no doubt, and as stray companions for a half-holiday must have had their attractions; but it is unnecessary to attribute Andrew Marvell’s style in controversy to his early acquaintance with a sea-faring population, for he is far more likely to have picked it up from his great friend and colleague, the author of Paradise Lost.
Marvell’s school education over, he went up to Cambridge, not to his father’s old college, but to the more splendid foundation of Trinity. About the date of his matriculation there is a doubt. In Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses there is a note to the effect that Marvell was admitted “in matriculam Acad. Cant. Coll. Trin.” on the 14th of December 1633, when the boy was but twelve years old. Dr. Lort, a famous master of Trinity in his day, writing in November 1765 to Captain Edward Thompson, of whom more later on, told the captain that until 1635 there was no register of admissions of ordinary students, or pensioners, as they are called, but only a register of Fellows and Foundation Scholars, and in this last-named register Marvell’s name appears as a Scholar sworn and admitted on the 13th of April 1638. As, however, Marvell took his B.A. degree in 1639, he must have been in residence long before April 1638. Probably Marvell went to Trinity about 1635, just before the register of pensioners was begun, as a pensioner, becoming a Scholar in 1638, and taking his degree in 1639.
Cambridge undergraduates do not usually keep diaries, nor after they have become Masters of Art are they much in the habit of giving details as to their academic career. Marvell is no exception to this provoking rule. He nowhere tells us what his University taught him or how. The logic of the schools he had no choice but to learn. Molineus, Peter Ramus, Seton, Keckerman were text-books of reputation, from one or another of which every Cambridge man had to master his simpliciters, his quids, his secundum quids, his quales, and his quantums. Aristotle’s Physics, Ethics, and Politics were “tutor’s books,” and those young men who loved to hear themselves talk were left free to discuss, much to Hobbes’s disgust, “the freedom of the will, incorporeal substance, everlasting nows, ubiquities, hypostases, which the people understand not nor will ever care for.”
In the life of Matthew Robinson,1 who went up to Cambridge a little later than Marvell (June 1645), and was probably a harder reader, we are told that “the strength of his studies lay in the metaphysics and in those subtle authors for many years which rendered him an irrefragable disputant de quolibet ente, and whilst he was but senior freshman he was found in the bachelor schools, disputing ably with the best of the senior sophisters.” Robinson despised the old-fashioned Ethics and Physics, but with the new Cartesian or Experimental Philosophy he was inter primos. History, particularly the Roman, was in great favour at both Universities at this time, and young men were taught, so old Hobbes again grumbles, to despise monarchy “from Cicero, Seneca, Cato and other politicians of Rome, and Aristotle of Athens, who seldom spake of kings but as of wolves and other ravenous beasts.”1 The Muses were never neglected at Cambridge, as the University exercises survive to prove, whilst modern languages, Spanish and Italian for example, were greedily acquired by such an eager spirit as Richard Crashaw, the poet, who came into residence at Pembroke in 1631. There were problems to be “kept” in the college chapel, lectures to be attended, both public and private, declamations to be delivered, and even in the vacations the scholars were not exempt from “exercises” either in hall or in their tutors’ rooms. Earnest students read their Greek Testaments, and even their Hebrew Bibles, and filled their note-books, working more hours a day than was good for their health, whilst the idle ones wasted their time as best they could in an unhealthy, over-crowded town, in an age which knew nothing of boating, billiards, or cricket. A tennis-court there was in Marvell’s time, for in Dr. Worthington’s Diary, under date 3rd of April 1637, it stands recorded that on that day and in that place that learned man received “a dangerous blow on the Eye.”2
The only incident we know of Marvell’s undergraduate days is remarkable enough, for, boy though he was, he seems, like the Gibbon of a later day, to have suddenly become a Roman Catholic. This occurrence may serve to remind us how, during Marvell’s time at Trinity, the University of Cambridge (ever the precursor in thought-movements) had a Catholic revival of her own, akin to that one which two hundred years afterwards happened at Oxford, and has left so much agreeable literature behind it. Fuller in his history of the University of Cambridge tells us a little about this highly interesting and important movement:—
“Now began the University (1633–4) to be much beautified in buildings, every college either casting its skin with the snake, or renewing its bill with the eagle, having their courts or at least their fronts and Gatehouses repaired and adorned. But the greatest alteration was in their Chapels, most of them being graced with the accession of organs. And seeing musick is one of the liberal arts, how could it be quarrelled at in an University if they sang with understanding both of the matter and manner thereof. Yet some took great distaste thereat as attendancie to superstition.”1
The chapel at Peterhouse, we read elsewhere, which was built in 1632, and consecrated by Bishop White of Ely, had a beautiful ceiling and a noble east window. “A grave divine,” Fuller tells us, “preaching before the University at St. Mary’s, had this