Nor the dullest been dead to them quite.
The poet who sings them may die,
But they are immortal and live,
For they are the life of the world."

Holdernesse was not the original home of the Marvells, who would seem to
have been mostly Cambridgeshire folk, though the name crops up in other
counties. Whether Cambridge "men" of a studious turn still take long
walks I do not know, but "some vast amount of years ago" it was
considered a pleasant excursion, either on foot or on a hired steed,
from Cambridge to Meldreth, where the Elizabethan manor-house, long
known as "the Marvells'," agreeably embodied the tradition that here it
was that the poet's father was born in 1586. The Church Registers have
disappeared. Proof is impossible. That there were Marvells in the
neighbourhood is certain. The famous Cambridge antiquary, William Cole,
perhaps the greatest of all our collectors, has included among his
copies of early wills those of several Marvells and Mervells of Meldreth
and Shepreth, belonging to pre-Reformation times, as their pious gifts
to the "High Altar" and to "Our Lady's Light" pleasingly testify. But
our Andrew was a determined Protestant.

The poet's father is an interesting figure in our Church history.
Educated at Emmanuel College, from whence he proceeded a Master of Arts
in 1608, he took Orders; and after serving as curate at Flamborough, was
inducted to the living of Winestead in 1614, where he remained till
1624, in which year he went to Hull as master of the Grammar School and
lecturer, that is preacher, of Trinity Church. The elder Marvell
belonged, from the beginning to the end of his useful and even heroic
life, to the Reformed Church of England, or, as his son puts it, "a
conformist to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England, though