Accused by Parker of aiming to degrade the clerical character, Marvell declares his veneration for that holy vocation, and that he reflected even on the failings of the men, from whom so much is expected, with indulgent reverence:—
“Their virtues are to be celebrated with all encouragement; and if their vices be not notoriously palpable, let the eye, as it defends its organ, so conceal the object by connivance.” But there are cases when even to write satirically against a clergyman may be not only excusable, but necessary:—“The man who gets into the church by the belfry or the window, ought never to be borne in the pulpit; and so the man who illustrates his own corrupt doctrines with as ill a conversation, and adorns the lasciviousness of his life with an equal petulancy of style and language.”—In such a concurrence of misdemeanors, what is to be done? The example and the consequence so pernicious! which could not be, “if our great pastors but exercise the wisdom of common shepherds, by parting with one to stop the infection of the whole flock, when his rottenness grows notorious. Or if our clergy would but use the instinct of other creatures, and chastise the blown deer out of their herd, such mischiefs might easily be 401 remedied. In this case it is that I think a clergyman is laid open to the pen of any one that knows how to manage it; and that every person who has either wit, learning, or sobriety, is licensed, if debauched, to curb him; if erroneous, to catechise him; and if foul-mouthed and biting, to muzzle him. Such an one would never have come into the church, but to take sanctuary; rather wheresoever men shall find the footing of so wanton a satyr out of his own bounds, the neighbourhood ought, notwithstanding all his pretended capering divinity, to hunt him through the woods, with hounds and horse, home to his harbour.”
And he frames an ingenious apology for the freedom of his humour, in this attack on the morals and person of his adversary:—
“To write against him (says Marvell) is the odiousest task that ever I undertook, and has looked to me all the while like the cruelty of a living dissection; which, however it may tend to public instruction, and though I have picked out the noxious creature to be anatomised, yet doth scarce excuse the offensiveness of the scent and fouling of my fingers: therefore, I will here break off abruptly, leaving many a vein not laid open, and many a passage not searched into. But if I have undergone the drudgery of the most loathsome part already (which is his personal character), I will not defraud myself of what is more truly pleasant, the conflict with, if it may be so called, his reason.”
It was not only in these “pen-combats” that this Literary Quarrel proceeded; it seems also to have broken out in the streets; for a tale has been preserved of a rencontre, which shows at once the brutal manners of Parker, and the exquisite wit of Marvell. Parker meeting Marvell in the streets, the bully attempted to shove him from the wall: but, even there, Marvell’s agility contrived to lay him sprawling in the kennel; and looking on him pleasantly, told him to “lie there for a son of a whore!” Parker complained to the Bishop of Rochester, who immediately sent for Marvell, to reprimand him; but he maintained that the doctor had so called himself, in one of his recent publications; and pointing to the preface, where Parker declares “he is ‘a true son of his mother, the Church of England:’ and if you read further on, my lord, you find he says: ‘The Church of England has spawned two bastards, the Presbyterians and the Congregationists;’ ergo, my lord, he expressly declares that he is the son of a whore!”
Although Parker retreated from any further attack, after the second part of “The Rehearsal Transprosed,” he in truth only suppressed passions to which he was giving vent in secrecy and silence. That, indeed, was not discovered till a posthumous work of his appeared, in which one of the most striking parts is a most disgusting caricature of his old antagonist. Marvell was, indeed, a republican, the pupil of Milton, and adored his master: but his morals and his manners were Roman—he lived on the turnip of Curtius, and he would have bled at Philippi. We do not sympathise with the fierce republican spirit of those unhappy times that scalped the head feebly protected by a mitre or a crown. But the private virtues and the rich genius of such a man are pure from the taint of party. We are now to see how far private hatred can distort, in its hideous vengeance, the resemblance it affects to give after nature. Who could imagine that Parker is describing Marvell in these words?—
“Among these insolent revilers of great fame for ribaldry was one Marvell. From his youth he lived in all manner of wickedness; and thus, with a singular petulancy from nature, he performed the office of a satirist for the faction, not so much from the quickness of his wit, as from the sourness of his temper. A vagabond, ragged, hungry poetaster, beaten at every tavern, where he daily received the rewards of his impudence in kicks and blows.[320] By the interest of Milton, to whom he was somewhat agreeable for his malignant wit, he became the under-secretary to Cromwell’s secretary.”
And elsewhere he calls him “a drunken buffoon,” and asserts that “he made his conscience more cheap than he had formerly made his reputation;” but the familiar anecdote of Marvell’s political honesty, when, wanting a dinner, he declined the gold sent to him by the king, sufficiently replies to the calumniator. Parker, then in his retreat, seems not to have been taught anything like modesty by his silence, as Burnet conjectured; who says, “That a face of brass must grow red when it is burnt as his was.” It was even then that the recreant, in silence, was composing the libel, which his cowardice dared not publish, but which his invincible malice has sent down to posterity.