no sooner come back from Ireland than he had stepped into the shoes of
the Lord-General Fairfax; and there were those, Lady Fairfax, I doubt
not, among the number, who believed that the new Lord-General thought it
was high time he should be where Fairfax's "scruple" at last put him. We
may be sure Cromwell's character was dissected even more than it was
extolled at Nunappleton. The famous Ode is by no means a panegyric, and
its true hero is the "Royal actor," whom Cromwell, so the poem suggests,
lured to his doom. It is not likely that the Ode was composed after
Marvell had left Nunappleton, though it may have been so before he went
there. There is an old untraceable tradition that Marvell was among the
crowd that saw the king die. What deaths have been witnessed, and with
what strange apparent apathy, by the London crowd! But for this
tradition one's imagination would trace to Lady Fairfax the most famous
of the stanzas.

But to return to the history of the Ode. In 1776 Captain Edward
Thompson, a connection of the Marvell family and a versatile sailor with
a passion for print, which had taken some odd forms of expression,
produced by subscription in three quarto volumes the first collected
edition of Andrew Marvell's works, both verse and prose. Such an edition
had been long premeditated by Thomas Hollis, one of the best friends
literature had in the eighteenth century. It was Hollis who gave to
Sidney Sussex College the finest portrait in existence of Oliver
Cromwell. Hollis collected material for an edition of Marvell with the
aid of Richard Barron, an early editor of Milton's prose works, and of
Algernon Sidney's _Discourse concerning Government_. Barron, however,
lost zeal as the task proceeded, and complained justly enough "of a want
of anecdotes," and as the printer, the well-known and accomplished
Bowyer, doubted the wisdom of the undertaking, it was allowed to drop.
Barron died in 1766, and Hollis in 1774, but the collections made by the