knew how to do, his surprise at the curtness of his friend's former
communication, and Marvell's reply to this letter has come down to us.
It is Marvell's glory that long before _Paradise Lost_ he recognised the
essential greatness of the blind secretary, and his letter is a fine
example of the mode of humouring a great man. Be it remembered, as we
read, that this letter was not addressed to one of the greatest names in
literature, but to a petulant and often peevish scholar, living of
necessity in great retirement, whose name is never once mentioned by
Clarendon, and about whom the voluminous Thurloe, who must have seen him
hundreds of times, has nothing to say except that he was "a blind man
who wrote Latin letters." Odder still, perhaps, Richard Baxter, whose
history of his own life and times is one of the most informing books in
the world, never so much as mentions the one and only man whose name
can, without any violent sense of unfitness, be given to the age about
which Baxter was writing so laboriously.

"HONOURED SIR,--I did not satisfie my self in the account I
gave you of presentinge your Book to my Lord, although it seemed to
me that I writ to you all which the messenger's speedy returne the
same night from Eaton would permit me; and I perceive that, by reason
of that hast, I did not give you satisfaction neither concerninge the
delivery of your Letter at the same time. Be pleased therefore to
pardon me and know that I tendered them both together. But my Lord
read not the Letter while I was with him, which I attributed to our
despatch, and some other businesse tendinge thereto, which I
therefore wished ill to, so farr as it hindred an affaire much better
and of greater importance, I mean that of reading your Letter. And to
tell you truly mine own imagination, I thought that he would not open
it while I was there, because he might suspect that I, delivering it
just upon my departure, might have brought in it some second