and fixing on Shadwell.
“Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dulness from his tender years;
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity:
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.”
Thus has it come about that Flecknoe, the Irish priest, whom Marvell visited in his Roman garret in 1645, bears a name ever memorable in literature.
Marvell’s own poem, though eclipsed by the splendour of Glorious John’s resounding lines, has an interest of its own as being, in its roughly humorous way, a forerunner of the “Dunciad” and “Grub Street” literature, by which in sundry moods ’tis “pleasure to be bound.” It describes seeking out the poetaster in his lodging “three staircases high,” at the sign of the Pelican, in a room so small that it seemed “a coffin set in the stair’s head.” No sooner was the rhymer unearthed than straightway he began to recite his poetry in dismal tones, much to his visitor’s dismay:—
“But I who now imagin’d myself brought
To my last trial, in a serious thought
Calm’d the disorders of my youthful breast
And to my martyrdom preparèd rest.
Only this frail ambition did remain,
The last distemper of the sober brain,
That there had been some present to assure
The future ages how I did endure.”
To stop the cataract of “hideous verse,” Marvell invited the scarecrow to dinner, and waits while he dresses. As they turn to leave, for the room is so small that the man who comes in last must be the first to go out, they meet a friend of the poet on the stairs, who makes a third at dinner. After dinner Flecknoe produces ten quires of paper, from which the friend proceeds to read, but so infamously as to excite their author’s rage:—
“But all his praises could not now appease
The provok’t Author, whom it did displease
To hear his verses by so just a curse
That were ill made, condemned to be read worse:
And how (impossible!) he made yet more
Absurdities in them than were before:
For his untun’d voice did fall or raise
As a deaf man upon the Viol plays,
Making the half-points and the periods run
Confus’der than the atoms in the sun:
Thereat the poet swell’d with anger full,”
and after violent exclamations retires in dudgeon back to his room. The faithful friend is in despair. What is he to do to make peace? “Who would commend his mistress now?” Marvell
“counselled him to go in time
Ere the fierce poet’s anger turned to rhyme.”
The advice was taken, and Marvell, finding himself at last free from boredom, went off to St. Peter’s to return thanks.