Waller

“ When Charles returned, Waller's congratulations were deemed by the King less good than his compliments to Cromwell. "Poets, Sir," answered Waller, "succeed better in fiction than in truth." The treacherous politician [Pg 345] was forgiven on every side, the witty poet was welcome in Parliament and everywhere.
Waller's first wife was rich, his second was fertile. When at last his doctor pronounced his sentence of death, he quoted some lines of Virgil, and went home to die. John Evelyn had been "his worthy Friend": to no man were men more charitable than to Waller. ”

“ The King one day asked him in raillery, 'How is it Waller, that you wrote a better encomium on Cromwell than on me.' May it please your Majesty, answered the bard, with the most admirable fineness, 'Poets generally succeed best in fiction.' Mr. Waller continued in the full vigour of his genius to the end of his life; his natural vivacity bore up against his years, and made his company agreeable to the last; which appears from the following little story.
King James II having ordered the earl of Sunderland to desire Mr. Waller to attend him one afternoon ”

“ An intense thirst, which successive handfuls of snow failed to allay, hunger, and extreme cold from lying so long in that dark den in such a season, made Waller hail the descending night, and with sombre satisfaction he quitted his lurking place, to seek on foot the road to Jellalabad.
"In England," thought he, "the Poor Law guardians have studied at times to discover upon how little mankind can be kept alive; and there have been learned philosophers who declared it possible for people to exist without food at all! ”

“ And one is the dark mount of Sorrow
And one the bright mountain of Prayer.
GO, LOVELY ROSE.
BY EDMUND WALLER.
Edmund Waller was born in Hertfordshire, England, in 1605. He went to King’s College, Cambridge. Later he entered parliament and took an active part in the long parliament. In 1664 he was exiled on account of participating in royalist plots. He returned to England under Cromwell’s administration. He died at Beaconsfield in 1687. Waller’s poems were first published in 1645. ”

“ From feeling startled, and in dread of his secret being known, a rapid change came over Waller; half-suspecting what must have occurred, and finding it covered by the girl’s superstitious notions, added to which there were the feathers, the sneezes, and the cook’s blessings upon his Majesty King George the Third, the boy’s risible faculties were so bestirred that he burst into a roar of laughter. ”

“ Waller himself, a general of the highest skill,—“the best shifter and chooser of ground” on either side,—was, like Turenne, at his best at the head of a small and highly-disciplined regular army. Only a Condé or a Cromwell could have enforced discipline and soldierly spirit in such men, ill-clad and unpaid as they were, and the only military quality lacking to Waller was precisely this supreme personal magnetism. ”

“ Edmund, the second son, inherited the estate, and represented Agmondesham in parliament, but at last turned quaker. William, the third son, was a merchant in London. Stephen, the fourth, was an eminent doctor of laws, and one of the commissioners for the union. There is said to have been a fifth, of whom no account has descended.
The character of Waller, both moral and intellectual, has been drawn by Clarendon, to whom he was familiarly known, with nicety, which certainly none to whom he was not known can presume to emulate. ”

“ When day was fairly in, Waller began to think of seeking a place of concealment till night again fell, when he felt certain that a few miles more along that open highway must eventually bring him to some gate of Jellalabad; but an abrupt turn of the road brought him suddenly upon a village, the gates of which stood open. There in the little street some armed horsemen were grouped around a well, and many people were astir previous to departing to their work in the fields; for all the country there is beautifully cultivated, and ever covered by a profusion of the richest vegetation. ”

“ Here he keeps open table for the banished royalists, as well as for the French wits, till his means are impaired by his liberality. A middling poet, a pitiful politician, a fickle dangler in affairs of love, Waller was an admirable host, and not only gave good dinners and suppers, but flavoured them delicately with compliment and repartee. ”

“ Let Waller, however, have this praise: his song soars with his subject. It is a true praise. There are men who write well until they try the noble, and then they fare like the falling star, which, when sought where it fell, is, according to an old fancy, discovered a poor jelly.
Sir Thomas Brown, a physician, whose prose writings are as peculiar as they are valuable, was of the same age as Waller. He partakes to a considerable degree of the mysticism which was so much followed in his day, only in his case it influences his literature most—his mode of utterance more than his mode of thought. ”

“ Dryden, who, in his dedication to the Rival Ladies, addressed to the earl of Orrery, thus characterizes Waller.
'The excellency and dignity of rhime were never fully known till Mr. Waller sought it: He first made writing easily an art; first shewed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs, which in the verses of those before him, runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it.'
Voltaire, in his letters concerning the English nation, speaking of British poets, thus mentions Waller. 'Our author was much talked of in France. ”

“ As he was also a zealous puritan, Waller naturally joined the opposition, and was elected to the Long parliament in 1640 as member for Andover. At the outbreak of the civil war he became colonel of a regiment of horse in the parliamentary army, and commanded the forces detached by Essex to besiege Portsmouth. ”

“ Sir Thomas Waller, however, took upon himself to reply. "Your writing, young gentleman, would be useless," he said; "for I am sorry to tell you that Sir Walter--who, though a hasty and passionate man, and sometimes very disrespectful to persons fully equal to himself, is a very good man, and much liked in the country--was arrested yesterday evening at the suit of the noble Earl here. ”

“ But one little hero of science, far down the table, greatly daring, spake: "I—I—I do believe the pail would weigh heavier!" and was acquitted by a peal of the royal laughter: "You are right, my honest man." Waller's clever excuse, when rallied on his fine Cromwellian strophes, and on their superiority to those written for the King's home-coming, that "poets succeed better in fiction than in truth," must have been met with the appreciative smile due to so exquisite a casuistry. ”

“ There are a few lines written in the Duchess’s Tasso, which he is said by Fenton to have kept a summer under correction. It happened to Waller, as to others, that his success was not always in proportion to his labour.
Of these pretty compositions, neither the beauties nor the faults deserve much attention. The amorous verses have this to recommend them, that they are less hyperbolical than those of some other poets. Waller is not always at the last gasp; he does not die of a frown, nor live upon a smile. There is, however, too much love, and too many trifles. ”

“ Blake and Mrs. Ray, but Mrs. Dade herself, insisted on being made of use,—insisted on being permitted to go to his bedside and there to minister, as only women can, to the suffering and distressed. Waller thought it over and succumbed. The lad was no longer delirious, at least, and if he revealed anything of what was uppermost in his mind it would be a conscious and voluntary revelation. There were some things he had said and that Waller alone had heard, the good old doctor wished were known to certain others of the garrison, and to no one more than Mrs. Dade ”

“ I shall only observe that Waller, though born in a court, and to an estate of five or six thousand pounds sterling a year, was never so proud or so indolent as to lay aside the happy talent which Nature had indulged him. The Earls of Dorset and Roscommon, the two Dukes of Buckingham, the Lord Halifax, and so many other noblemen, did not think the reputation they obtained of very great poets and illustrious writers, any way derogatory to their quality. They are more glorious for their works than for their titles. ”

“ Few will hesitate to acknowledge that he has more fancy and more tenderness than Waller, but less choice, less judgment and knowledge where to stop, less of the equability which never offends, less attention to the unity and thread of his little pieces. ”

“ As I was informed that the King would himself be present at the ball, I knew that German etiquette required that the company should arrive before his Majesty; and although now every minute I expected the arrival of the Callonbys, I dared not defer my departure any longer.
"They are certain to be at the ball," said Waller, and that sentence never left my mind. ”

“ At this moment, a tall, dashing-looking, half-swaggering fellow, in a very sufficient envelope of box-coats, entered the coffee-room, and unwinding a shawl from his throat, showed me the honest and manly countenance of my friend Jack Waller, of the —th dragoons, with whom I had served in the Peninsula. ”

“ Among these poets, and in the front rank, is Edmund Waller, who lived and wrote in this manner to his eighty-second year: a man of wit and fashion, well-bred, familiar from his youth with great people, endued with tact and foresight, quick at repartee, not easy to put out of countenance, but selfish, with hardly any feelings, having changed sides more than once, and bearing very well the memory of his tergiversations; in short, a good model of the worldling and the courtier. ”

“ Even then Waller had been a member of Parliament, and had been elected to sit in that assembly whilst he was in his seventeenth year. Waller’s circumstances, his destiny, his views of life, his genius, his disposition, were as opposite to those of Massinger and Ben Jonson as can possibly be conceived. He seemed born a courtier; and every effort he made was to advance himself at first in that career, and afterwards as a politician. His first appearance as a poet, in his 290eighteenth year, was to congratulate King James on the escape of Prince Charles at St. Audera, when returning from Spain ”

“ But of these images time has tarnished the splendour. A fiction, not only detected but despised, can never afford a solid basis to any position, though sometimes it may furnish a transient allusion, or slight illustration. No modern monarch can be much exalted by hearing that, as Hercules had his “club” he has his “navy.”
But of the praise of Waller, though much may be taken away, much will remain; for it cannot be denied that he added something to our elegance of diction, and something to our propriety of thought ”

“ Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from the “hysterical riot of the Jacobeans” into measured and orderly classic cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of technique only; they write as distinct art-masters ”

“ Waller had a brother-in-law, Tomkyns, who was clerk of the Queen's council, and at the same time had a very numerous acquaintance, and great influence, in the city. Waller and he, conversing with great confidence, told both their own secrets and those of their friends; and, surveying the wide extent of their conversation, imagined that they found in the majority of all ranks great disapprobation of the violence of the Commons, and unwillingness to continue the war. They knew that many favoured the king, whose fear concealed their loyalty ”

“ As he ate, falling to without uttering "Bismillah!" an omission which his captors did not fail to remark, he thought that cookery must be a sublime science at home—a veritable branch of the fine arts; but hunger is ever an excellent seasoning to any meal.
The snow had now begun to melt fast, and for four days Waller was kept a close prisoner, without a chance of escape, though he brooded over it incessantly, and writhed in spirit to be thus detained from his duty in Jellalabad, where doubtless the task of vengeance—it might be the deliverance of the unhappy hostages—had already begun. ”

“ There, gently—that’s it.”
“Wall, I guess this is Eden,” cried Big Waller, gazing around him with unfeigned delight. “Leastwise, if it ain’t, it must be the very nixt location to them there diggins of old Father Adam. Ain’t it splendiferous?”
Big Waller was an out-and-out Yankee trapper. It is a mistake to suppose that all Yankees “guess” and “calculate,” and talk through their nose. There are many who don’t, as well as many who do; but certain it is that Big Waller possessed all of these peculiarities in an alarming degree. ”

“ In consequence of this letter, the Lords ordered Portland and Waller to be confronted; when the one repeated his charge, and the other his denial. The examination of the plot being continued (July 1) , Thinn, usher of the house of Lords, deposed that Mr. Waller having had a conference with the Lord Portland in an upper room, Lord Portland said, when he came down, "Do me the favour to tell my Lord Northumberland, that Mr. Waller has extremely pressed me to save my own life and his, by throwing the blame upon the Lord Conway and the Earl of Northumberland." ”