Some notes on Andrew Marvell : Marvell before and after the continental tour 1642 and 1647

THE precise limits of Marvell's four-year tour of the Continent during the 1640s, attested in Milton's letter to Bradshaw of February 1653 and in poems such as 'Fleckno, an English Priest at Rome', have been the subject of much speculation. Thanks to Mrs Burdon's article in the previous number of this journal we now know that Marvell was in London at the end of February 1642, and a passage (lines 21-32) that occurs in the commendatory verses that he composed for publication in Lovelace's Lucasta has generally been taken as implying that he was back there before the book was licensed on 4 February 1648.