couplet. It occurs in his epistle to Mrs.
Broughton, the Abigail to Sacharissa:

"A thousand Cupids in those curls do sit
(Those curious nets! thy slender fingers knit)."

Was not Grey's memorable quatrain in
the elegy:

"Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood,"

anticipated by those lines of Waller,
denoting the need Genius has of Opportunity?

"Great Julius, on the mountains bred,
A flock, perhaps, or herd had led.
He that the world subdued, had been
But the best wrestler on the green."

And is not the principal charm of Byron's
famous commemoration of Kirke White, in
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but a
literal transcript from Waller's ejaculation
to his lady-love, singing a song of his
composing?

"That eagle's fate and mine are one,
Which, on the shaft that made him die,
Espy'd a feather of his own,
Wherewith he wont to soar so high."

Thus, eloquently, did Waller breathe
through his oaten reed the tones of love and
flattery. Vainly, however, as we have seen
when those notes were syllabled to Sacharissa.
Immediately upon her rather conclusive
rejection of his addresses, it has been
conjectured that, for the purpose of dissipating his
anguish, he accompanied the Earl of Warwick
in an expedition to the Bermudas. He
consoled himself in effect rather differently,
however, under the poignancy of his
disappointment. And Sacharissa knew it! He
fled for comfort to the arms of a second
wife, a sort of French Wilfrid (a personage,
it may be remembered, described by Lord
Jeffreys as " a tame rabbit boiled to rags,")
—a lady, in truth, of such absolute insignificance,
individually, that it remains, to this
day a moot question, whether her maiden-
name were really Bresse or Breaux. Terrible
is the comment, uttered by Dr. Johnson upon
this incident in Waller's history, where he
observes, in one of those sonorous sentences so
provokingly equipoised, "he doubtless praised
one whom he would have been afraid to
marry, and perhaps married one whom he
would have been ashamed to praise." So
ridiculous was Waller's second wife in the
eyes of Johnson, even with Tetty, his own
red-faced Blowsabella vividly surviving in
his remembrance!

Yet, while Waller's first wife brought him
but two, his second probably astonished him
with no less than thirteen children,—five
sons and eight daughters. First Consul
Bonaparte would certainly have called her no
mediocrity!

Politically, Edmund Waller was a
Trimmer of the most shameless effrontery,
proffering his allegiance to whatever power chanced
to be in the ascendant—a courtier with the
most flexible knees and the most supple
vertebrae. His existence, it should be borne
in remembrance—beginning in the early
spring of sixteen hundred and five and
ending in the late autumn of sixteen
hundred and eighty-seven—extended over
an interval embracing within it, as by a sort
of monopoly, the principal part of the
seventeenth century. During the lapse of nearly
eighty-three years he enjoyed the privilege
of a personal intercourse with five
remarkable sovereigns, with four of whom he is even
recorded to have interchanged familiar
compliments. His intimacy with the greatest of
them all—his kinsman, Cromwell—he,
himself, immediately upon the death of the Lord
Protector, crowned with that glorious
panegyric, which is universally recognised as
incomparably his poetic masterpiece. Yet, with
scarcely a momentary pause between, we find
him, directly afterwards, chaunting rapturously
over the event of the Restoration; and
when rallied, good-humouredly, by the Merry
Monarch, upon the inferiority of the Royalist
verses when contrasted with their Republican
predecessors, with the courtliest grace
proffering in extenuation that memorable rejoinder,
"Poets, Sire, succeed better in Fiction
than in Truth." His wit, indeed, has few
better attestations of its brilliancy than those
furnished by other equally well-known and
well-authenticated palace anecdotes. While,
as delightfully illustrative of his humorous
extravagancies, it will be sufficient to
particularise the reason extracted from him in
palliation of his monstrous eulogium upon the
Duchess of Newcastle's elegiac lines on the
Death of a Stag (verses which he had
protested he would have given up all his own
compositions to have penned). "Nothing,"
said he, when charged with the flattery, " was
too much to be given that a lady might be
saved from the disgrace of such a vile performance."
But—ah, the vengeance upon Sacharissa!
A vengeance drawn down upon
herself in the old age of both—of the quondam
lover and the whilome beauty. When would
Mr. Waller again write verses upon her?
asked Sacharissa. Fancy the bow of the old
beau among his rustling lace and his flowing
knots,—among his wrinkles and his love-
locks, as he replied with the frostiest smile
upon his withered lips, " When you are as
young, Madam, and as handsome as you were
then!"

The slighted poet was, indeed, avenged.
If, however, the lady Dorothea possessed
within herself the slightest sense of a pretension
to anything like decent consistency of
character, it could scarcely have been aught
else to her but matter for earnest self-gratulation
that she had once, in her sagacious
youth, rejected a man whose whole life, after
that rejection, might be accurately designated
one long series of startling antitheses and disgraceful