Lady State's First Two Sittings: Marvell's Satiric Canon

Abstract

Twenty years ago, I strongly supported the case made by George de Forest Lord for Andrew Marvell's authorship of the two Restoration satires, the Second and Third Advices to a Painter, to which Marvell's Last Instructions to a Painterwas obviously a sequel.1 These poems were written in parodic response to Edmund Waller's Instructions to a Painter, for the Drawing of the Posture and Progress of His Majesties Forces at Sea, which appeared in the spring of 1666 as a progovernment eulogistic account of the first phase of the Second Dutch War, and especially of the conduct of James, duke of York, as admiral. Manuscript copies of the Second and ThirdAdvices appeared on the streets respectively in December 1666 andJanuary 1667, when Samuel Pepys recorded their existence in his Diary. In the first printed editions of 1667, they were attributed to Sir John Denham, who, for several good reasons, including his temporary madness at the time, could not have been responsible for them. The question of who actually wrote them has never been definitively resolved. Lord's original argument was based primarily on internal evidence: the Second, Third, and Last painter poems showed a marked similarity of attitude to the major figures in the Restoration government.2 In his edition of Marvell's poems, which included the Advices, Lord was further impressed by the provenance and testimony of what is now known as the Popple manuscript, which came from the family of Marvell's beloved nephew, William Popple, and is now in the Bodleian library. Lord's arguments about the value of this manuscript in establishing the Marvell canon,