Which way soe'er my grief Doth throw my sight to court relief, I shall but meet despair, for all Will prophesy my funeral: The very silence of the room And while my children's tears, For by examples I Must know that others' sorrows die Soon as ourselves, and none survive To keep our memories alive : Even our false tombs, as loath to say On the whole, Habington is entitled to the modest praise he claims for his poetry, "not so high as to be wondered at nor so low as to be contemned." When he is writing at his best, his style is vigorous, harmonious, and correct: the attentive reader, however, will observe in his language a tendency to inversion which makes it sometimes harsh and obscure. There is a certain superficial resemblance between the lover of Castara and the lover of Sacharissa. They were born within a year of each other; they occupied about the same position in society; they each professedly continued the Petrarcan tradition, and were equally strangers to the true Petrarcan spirit. But here the likeness ceases; and in character and fortune, as well as in poetical aim, the career of Waller offers a striking contrast to that of Habington. Edmund Waller, the son of Thomas Waller, the representative of an old family holding lands in Sussex, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, was born at Coleshill, in Hertfordshire, on 3rd March 1605-6. His father, who had inherited most of the family possessions, died when his son was eleven years old. Edmund was educated at Eton and afterwards at King's College, 1 Castara, Part IV., "The Holy Man." Cambridge, and was chosen to sit in the House of Commons at first, when only sixteen, as member for Agmondesham (Amersham), which he represented in James I.'s third Parliament, and in Charles I.'s first Parliament, as member for Chipping Wycombe. In the second Parliament of this reign he was re-elected for Agmondesham. In 1631 he added to his already large fortune by marrying the heiress of John Banks, a rich merchant in the city of London. His wife died when he was about nine-and-twenty, and he then paid his addresses to the Lady Dorothea Sidney, daughter of the Earl of Leicester, whom he has celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. His suit was not successful: Lady Dorothea married Lord Spencer (afterwards Earl of Sunderland), who was killed at the battle of Newbury; while Waller himself married, as his second wife, a lady of the name of Bracey, by whom he had a large family. In 1639, when the King summoned his third Parliament, Waller was again elected to sit for Agmondesham. In this Parliament he showed a leaning to the principles which distinguished the family of his mother-who was aunt of John Hampden and connected by marriage with Cromwell-by speaking strongly against the clergy as supporters of the King's attempts to govern absolutely: while in the Long Parliament, in which he was re-elected to his old seat, he was chosen as one of the managers of the prosecution of the judges who had declared ship-money to be legal. But when a bill was brought in for the abolition of Episcopacy, Waller spoke against it on the same ground which he had taken up in resisting the encroachments of the Crown, namely, that it undermined the foundations of the Constitution. On the outbreak of the Civil War he sent the King £1000, and, though he was appointed by the Parliament one of the commissioners to treat with Charles after the battle of Edgehill, he soon showed the extent of his Royalist sympathies by joining in the attempt known to history as Waller's Plot. When this was discovered, he behaved with mean cowardice, and endeavoured to gain safety for himself by giving up the names of the Earl of Portland and Lord Conway, against whom there was no evidence but his own, and by implicating unnecessarily the Earl of Northumberland. As for his own share, he abased himself before his judges, and threw himself on their mercy, pleading his cause with such dexterity that the Commons contented themselves with expelling him from their House, a sentence which he is said to have bought with the bribe of £30,000. Being afterwards tried and condemned by a military court, he finally escaped with the penalty of banishment for life and a fine of £10,000. This was in 1644. He now travelled for some time on the Continent, eventually joining the remains of the English Court at Paris, where he continued to entertain members of the Cavalier party till his resources were almost exhausted; but in his extremity he was allowed in 1652, through the intercession of his brother-in-law, Colonel Scrope, to return to England. Here he paid assiduous court to Cromwell, and wrote-probably about 1654-his Panegyric to My Lord Protector. This did not prevent him at the Restoration from publishing his lines, To the King, Upon his Majesty's Happy Return, an inconsistency upon which Johnson remarks with justice in his Life of Waller: "It is not possible to read without some contempt and indignation poems of the same author, ascribing the highest degree of power and piety to Charles the First, then transferring the same power and piety to Oliver Cromwell;1 now inviting Oliver to take the crown, and then congratulating Charles the Second on his recovered right." Charles the Second, however, who set a high value on Waller's social qualities, judged him leniently, and in 1665 granted his request for the Provostship of Eton; but Clarendon refused to set the seal to the grant, 1 In his lines To the King, On his Navy, the conclusion is : To thee his chosen, more indulgent, he In his Panegyric on the Lord Protector he says: The only cure which could from heaven come down VOL. III T on the ground that the statutes of the College did not allow the office to be filled by a layman.1 When the Chancellor was impeached in 1667, Waller, who was then member for Hastings, spoke against him with great bitterness; but when, after Clarendon's banishment, he again applied for the Provostship, the Council confirmed the previous decision. He continued to sit and speak in Parliament till his death, being elected in 1678 for Chipping Wycombe, and in 1685 for Saltash. In his last year, desirous of ending his life where he began it, he bought a small estate at Coleshill, but he died at Beaconsfield on the 21st October 1687, and was buried in the churchyard of that place. 2 Waller's poetical powers were highly appreciated by the age whose taste he helped to form, and his fame has been perpetuated by the praise of poets who brought to perfection the style to which he first opened the way. According to the gossip of Aubrey, he seems to have put forward claims as an inventor which certainly will not bear to be investigated. "When," says that biographer, "he was a brisk young spark and first studied poetry, 'Methought,' said he, 'I never saw a good copy of English verses: they want smoothness: then I began to essay.' If Waller meant to say, in the large sense of the words, that he had never read a smooth copy of verses in English poetry, he can have read very little of writers like Daniel, Drayton, or Drummond, to say nothing of Shakespeare, or even Surrey. But if he was thinking of the improvement of the heroic couplet, even on this narrower ground he had no right to claim priority of invention. He seems to have pretended that his style was evolved from that of Fairfax, the translator of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. "Many besides myself," says Dryden, "have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the Godfrey of Bulloigne, which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax." Waller had no doubt studied Fairfax carefully; his references to the Jerusalem are frequent in one of 1 See p. 174. 2 Lives of Eminent Men. 3 Dryden, Preface to Fables. his poems he inserts a couplet taken direct from Godfrey of Bulloigne, and from this poem he also borrows two fine similes.2 But as a whole there is little in common between the stately semi-archaic style of Fairfax and the familiar courtliness of Waller, who probably hoped, by avowing a pretended debt to an older poet, to conceal his obligations to his more immediate predecessors. I do not think that any one can read the early books of Sandys' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses or Sir John Beaumont's Metamorphosis of Tobacco without perceiving that, for the compression of sentences and periods within the limits of one or more couplets, which is the leading characteristic of Waller's versification, the author of the lines on Prince Charles's escape at St. Andero owes as much to these two writers as they themselves owe to Drayton's Heroical Epistles. When this justice is rendered to those who deserve it, much remains to the credit of Waller as an inventive poet. He may be acknowledged as the founder of the familiar style in complimentary poetry. He headed the reaction against the metaphysical style of Donne, the aim of whose followers always was to attract attention to themselves by the novelty rather than by the propriety of their thought, whereas Waller understood that the first principle in the art of poetry was to please the judicious reader. Without discarding the hyperbole, which was considered essential to poetical "wit," he sought to convey his flatteries in the language common to refined society, and he replaced the pedantic metaphors borrowed by Lyly from scholastic science, and the subtle conceits introduced by Jonson from the Alexandrian epigrammatists, by such classical allusions as were within the understanding of every well-read gentleman. 1 There public care with private passion fought A doubtful combat in his noble thought. Compare Waller's Lines to the Queen occasioned upon Sight of Her Majesty's Picture with Fairfax's Godfrey, vi. 70. 2 Compare vv. 9-13 in A Panegyric to My Lord Protector with Fairfax's Godfrey, iii. 52, and the concluding lines To My Lord Falkland with Godfrey, xx. 114. |