No record remains of Marvell's travels during these years. Up and down
his writings the careful reader will come across pleasant references to
foreign manners and customs, betokening the keen humorous observer, and
the possession of that wide-eyed faculty that takes a pleasure, half
contemplative, half the result of animal spirits, in watching the way of
the world wherever you may chance to be. Of another and an earlier
traveller, Sir Henry Wotton, we read in "Walton's _Life_."

"And whereas he was noted in his youth to have a sharp wit and apt to
jest, _that_ by time, travel, and conversation was so polished and
made useful, that his company seemed to be one of the delights of
mankind."

In all Marvell's work, as poet, as Parliamentarian, as controversialist,
we shall see the travelled man. Certainly no one ever more fully grasped
the sense of the famous sentence given by Wotton to Milton, when the
latter was starting on his travels: "_I pensieri stretti ed il viso
sciolto._"

Marvell was in Rome about 1645. I can give no other date during the
whole four years. This, our only date, rests upon an assumption. In
Marvell's earliest satirical poem he gives an account of a visit he paid
in Rome to the unlucky poetaster Flecknoe, who was not in Rome until
1645. If, therefore, the poem records an actual visit, it follows that
the author of the poem was in Rome at the same time. It is not very
near, but it is as near as we can get.

Richard Flecknoe was an Irish priest of blameless life, with a passion
for scribbling and for printing. His exquisite reason for both these
superfluous acts is worth quoting:--