Mr. Marvel begins this book with a panegyric on the constitution of the English government, shewing how happy the people are under such wholesome laws, which if faithfully observed, must make a people happy, and a monarch great. He observes, that the king and the subject are equally under the laws; and that the former is no longer king than he continues to obey them. 'So that, says he, the kings of England, are in nothing inferior to other princes, save in being more abridg'd from injuring their own subjects, but have as large a field as any of external felicity, wherein to exercise their own virtue, and to reward and encourage it in others. In short there is nothing that comes nearer the divine perfection, than when the monarch, as with us, enjoys a capacity of doing all the good imaginable to mankind, under a disability of all that is evil.' After slightly tracing popery from earlier times, he begins with the Dutch war in 1665; but dwells most upon the proceedings at Rome, from November 1675, to July 1677. He relates the occasion of the Dutch war, shews that the papists, and the French in particular, were the true springs of all our councils; and draws the following picture of popery. 'It is such a thing, as cannot but for want of a word to express it, be called a religion; nor is it to be mentioned with that civility, which is otherwise decent to be used in speaking of the differences of human opinions about divine matters; were it either open Juadism, or plain Turkery, or, there is yet a certain Bona Fides in the most extravagant belief, and the sincerity of an erroneous profession may render it more pardonable: But this is a compound of all the three, an extract of whatever is most ridiculous or impious in them, incorporated with more peculiar absurdities of its own, in which those were deficient; and all this deliberately contrived, and knowingly carried on, by the solid imposture of priests, under the name of Christianity.' This great man died, not without strong suspicions of being poisoned, August 16, 1678, in the 58th year of his age, and was interred in the church of St. Giles's in the Fields; and in the year 1688 the town of Kingston upon Hull contributed a sum of money to erect a monument over him, in St. Giles's church, for which an epitaph was composed by an able hand; but the minister of that church, piously forbad both the inscription and monument to be placed there. Mr. Wood tells us, that in his conversation, he was very modest, and of few words; and Mr. Cooke observes, 'that he was very reserved among people he did not very well know; but a most delightful, and improving companion amongst his friends.'