Born, at Coleshill, Herts, 3 March 1605. Educated at Eton, and at King’s Coll., Camb. M.P. for Amersham, 1621; for Chipping Wycombe, 1626; for Amersham, 1628–29, 1640; for Hastings, 1661–78; for Saltash, 1685–87. Married (i) Anna Banks, 15 July 1631; (ii) Mary Bresse [or Breaux?]. Imprisoned for a year, and fined, for high treason, 1643–44; exiled, in France, 1644–53. Died, at Beaconsfield, 21 Oct. 1687. Buried there. Works: Four Speeches in the House of Commons, pubd. separately, 1641; “Speech … 4 July, 1643,” 1643; “Workes,” 1645; “A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector” (under initials: E. W.), 1655; “Upon the late Storme and Death of his Highness ensuing the same” [1658]; “To the King, upon his Majestie’s Happy Return” [1660]; “Poem on St. James’s Park,” 1661; “To my Lady Morton” (anon.) 1661; “To the Queen” [1663]; “Pompey the Great” (with others; anon.), 1664; “Upon her Majesties new buildings at Somerset House,” 1665; “Instructions to a Painter,” 1666. Posthumous: “The Maids Tragedy altered, etc.,” 1690. Collected Works: “Poems,” ed. by G. T. Drury. 1893. Life: by P. Stockdale, 1772.

Personal

  He is of somewhat above a middle stature, thin body, not at all robust: fine thin skin, his face somewhat of an olivaster; his hayre frizzd, of a brownish colour; full eye, popping out and working: ovall faced, his forehead high and full of wrinckles. His head but small, braine very hott, and apt to be cholerique—Quanto doctior, eo iracundior.—Cicero. He is something magisteriall, and haz a great mastership of the English language. He is of admirable and gracefull elocution and exceeding ready…. He haz but a tender weake body, but was alwayes very temperate … (quaere Samuel Butler) made him damnable drunke at Somerset-house, where, at the water-stayres he fell downe and had a cruell fall. ’Twas pitty to use such a sweet swan so inhumanely. He hath a great memory and remembers a history etc. etc. best when read to him: he uses to make his daughters read to him. Yet, notwithstanding his great witt and mastership in rhetorique, etc. he will oftentimes be guilty of mispelling in English. He writes a lamentably (bad) hand as bad (as) the scratching of a hen.

  When he had lost all hopes of Sacharissa, he looked round him for an easier conquest, and gained a Lady of the family of Bresse, or Breaux. The time of his marriage is not exactly known. It has not been discovered that his wife was won by his poetry; nor is anything told of her, but that she brought him many children. He doubtless praised some whom he would have been afraid to marry, and perhaps married one whom he would have been ashamed to praise. Many qualities contribute to domestick happiness, upon which poetry has no colours to bestow; and many airs and sallies may delight imagination, which he who flatters them never can approve. There are charms made only for distant admiration. No spectacle is nobler than a blaze.

  The courtly Waller, like the lady in the “Maids’ Tragedy,” loved with his ambition,—not with his eyes; still less with his heart. A critic, in designating the poets of that time, says truly that “Waller still lives in Sacharissa:” he lives in her name more than she does in his poetry; he gave that name a charm and a celebrity which has survived the admiration his verses inspired, and which has assisted to preserve them and himself from oblivion…. Waller’s Sacharissa was the Lady Dorothea Sydney, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, and born in 1620. At the time he thought fit to make her the object of his homage, she was about eighteen, beautiful, accomplished, and admired. Waller was handsome, rich, a wit, and five-and-twenty. He had ever an excellent opinion of himself, and a prudent care of his worldly interests. He was a great poet, in days when Spenser was forgotten, Milton neglected, and Pope unborn…. The lady was content to be the theme of a fashionable poet: but when he presumed farther, she crushed all hopes with the most undisguised aversion and disdain.

  The wife and the mother may be said, however, to have survived, in the popular memory, the gallant husband, and the clever but unstable son. Sacharissa is a name more universally known than the name and title of either Lady Spencer or Countess of Sunderland. Waller formed the name “pleasantly,” as he was wont to say, from saccharum, sugar. Whether Waller were ever more than her poetical suitor may be doubted; though Dorothy is said to have once rejected his suit.

  With all his brilliant poetic gifts and social accomplishments, Waller’s seems to have been a mean and poor nature—selfish and pleasure-loving in prosperity, and abject and servile in adversity.

  As Beatrice and Laura represent the ideal lady of Dante and of Petrarch’s age, so Waller’s Sacharissa is the type of all that was fair and excellent in the womanhood of the seventeenth century. But Sacharissa, unlike ces belles dames du tems jadis, is more for us than a mere dream of beauty and goodness. She has a very attractive and interesting personality of her own. The pictures of her which Vandyke painted, as she appeared to Waller in the bloom of her youthful loveliness, adorn the walls of more than one ancient and stately house. At Penshurst, at Althrop, at Petworth, we see her under many forms and in many different costumes, and always, as Horace Walpole said, “charmingly handsome.”

General

  The best of poets.

  The | Workes | of | Edmond Waller | Esquire, | Lately a Member of the Hon | our able House of | Commons, | in this Present Parliament. | London. | Printed for Thomas Walkley. | 1645.

  I cannot but bewail the transitoriness of their fame, as well as other men’s, when I hear Mr. Waller is turned to burlesque among them, while he is alive, which never happened to old poets till many years after their death; and though I never knew him enough to adore him as many have done, and easily believe he may be, as your Lordship says, enough out of fashion, yet I am apt to think some of the old cut-work bands were of as fine thread, and as well wrought, as any of our new points; and, at least, that all the wit he and his company spent, in heightening love and friendship, was better employed, than what is laid out so prodigally by the modern wits, in the mockery of all sorts of religion and government.

  Chaucer threw in Latin, French, Provençal, and other languages, like new stum to raise a fermentation; in Queen Elizabeth’s time, it grew fine, but came not to an head and spirit, did not shine and sparkle, till Mr. Waller set it a running.

  Waller was the first refiner of English poetry, at least of English rhyme; but his performances still abound with many faults, and what is more material, they contain but feeble and superficial beauties. Gaitey, wit, and ingenuity, are their ruling character: they aspire not to the sublime; still less to the pathetic. They treat of love, without making us feel any tenderness; and abound in panegyric, without exciting admiration. The panegyric, however, on Cromwell, contains more force than we should expect from the other compositions of this poet.

  Our poetry was not quite harmonized in Waller’s time; so that this, [“On the Death of the Lord Protector.”] which would be now looked upon as a slovenly sort of versification, was, with respect to the times in which it was written, almost a prodigy of harmony. A modern reader will chiefly be struck with the strength of thinking and the turn of the compliments bestowed upon the Usurper. Every body has heard the answer our poet made Charles II. who asked him how his poem upon Cromwell came to be finer than his panegyric upon himself. Your majesty, replies Waller, knows, that poets always succeed best in fiction.

  Edmund Waller, sometimes styled “the English Tibullus,” excelled all his predecessors, in harmonious versification. His love verses have all the tenderness and politeness of the Roman poet; and his panegyric on Cromwell has been ever esteemed a masterpiece in its kind. His vein is never redundant, like that of Cowley; we frequently wish he had said more, but never that he had said less.

  His works gave a new era to English poetry.

  The delicacy, which he cultivated, restrains him to a certain nicety and caution, even when he writes upon the slightest matter. He has, therefore, in his whole volume, nothing burlesque, and seldom any thing ludicrous or familiar. He seems always to do his best; though his subjects are often unworthy of his care…. 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. Little things are made too important; and the Empire of Beauty is represented as exerting its influence further than can be allowed by the multiplicity of human passions, and the variety of human wants…. He certainly very much excelled in smoothness most of the writers who were living when his poetry commenced…. The general character of his poetry is elegance and gaiety. He is never pathetick, and very rarely sublime. He seems neither to have a mind much elevated by nature, nor amplified by learning. His thoughts are such as a liberal conversation and large acquaintance with life would easily supply…. 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, whom you proscribe, Sir, owed his reputation to the graces of his manner, though he frequently stumbled, and even fell flat; but a few of his smaller pieces are as graceful as possible: one might say that he excelled in painting ladies in enamel, but could not succeed in portraits in oil, large as life.

  To say of Carew that he is superior to Waller, is saying nothing; for if every line of Waller were lost, I know not that poetry would have much to lament. The works of both however should be preserved, and I hope ever will be, as necessary to mark the progress of our language toward refinement.

  If Waller differed from the Cowleian sect of writers, he differed for the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit: nor is the langour of his verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs.

  His reputation was great, and somewhat more durable than that of similar poets has generally been: he did not witness its decay in his own protracted life, nor was it much diminished at the beginning of the next century. Nor was this wholly undeserved. Waller has a more uniform elegance, a more sure facility and happiness of expression, and, above all, a greater exemption from glaring faults, such as pedantry, extravagance, conceit, quaintness, obscurity, ungrammatical and unmeaning constructions, than any of the Caroline era with whom he would naturally be compared. We have only to open Carew or Lovelace to perceive the difference; not that Waller is wholly without some of these faults, but that they are much less frequent…. If he rarely sinks, he never rises very high; and we find much good sense and selection, much skill in the mechanism of language and metre, without ardor and without imagination. In his amorous poetry he has little passion or sensibility; but he is never free and petulant, never tedious, and never absurd. His praise consists much in negations; but, in a comparative estimate, perhaps negations ought to count for a good deal.

  The crying truth is louder than Mr. Hallam, and cries, in spite of Fame, with whom poor Waller was an “enfant trouvé,” an heir by chance, rather than merit,—that he is feeble poetically quite as surely as morally and politically, and that, so far from being an equal and sustained poet, he has not strength for unity even in his images, nor for continuity in his thoughts, nor for adequacy in his expression, nor for harmony in his versification.

  Edmund Waller hardly deserves a place among the best names in English literature, either as a poet or as a man; and in giving him a small space here, I yield my own judgement to that of Dryden and Pope…. As a poet, Waller is certainly “smooth,” as Pope styles him, and comparatively destitute of that affectation which characterizes most of his contemporaries.

  Waller’s poems were universally read and admired in the age in which they were published: nor was their general popularity much diminished during the early portion of the last century. The greater part of them now seldom find a reader; and the large majority of educated Englishmen are familiar with only a few lines of Waller; yet these few lines are such standard favourites, that their author’s poetical reputation is safely preserved by them.

  Pope said of Waller, that he would have been a better poet had he entertained less admiration of people in power. But surely it was the excess of that propensity which inspired him. He was naturally timid and servile; and poetry is the flower of a man’s real nature, whatever it be, provided there be intellect and music enough to bring it to bear. Waller’s very best pieces are those in praise of sovereign authority and of a disdainful mistress. He would not have sung Saccharissa so well had she favored him.

  There are not, perhaps, two hundred really good lines in all Waller’s poetry. Extravagant conceits, feeble verses, and defective rhymes are constantly recurring, although the poems, being mostly short, are not tedious. Of elevated imagination, profound thought, or passion, he was utterly destitute; and it is only in detached passages, single stanzas, or small pieces, finished with great care and elegance, as the lines on a lady’s girdle, those on the dwarfs, and a few of the lyrics, that we can discern that play of fancy, verbal sweetness, and harmony which gave so great a name to Waller for more than a hundred years.

  The passages of merit in Waller’s writings that elevate him from “the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,” prove that he had the intellect to be a far greater poet than he was, but he had not the heart. He was a brilliant wit, an elegant verse-writer, but he was as destitute of deep feeling as he was of high principle. It was only when trembling on the borders of the grave that he manifested anything like a noble and generous emotion…. He was unfaithful to the trust reposed in him, and, with full and brilliant capacity, fell immeasurably below the high office of the bard.

  One thing must be admitted in regard to Waller’s poetry: it is free from all mere verbiage and empty sound; if he rarely or never strikes a very powerful note, there is at least always something for the fancy or the understanding, as well as for the ear, in what he writes. He abounds also in ingenious thoughts, which he dresses to the best advantage, and exhibits with great transparency of style. Eminent, however, as he is in his class, he must be reckoned among that subordinate class of poets who think and express themselves chiefly in similitudes, not among those who conceive and write passionately and metaphorically. He had a decorative and illuminating, but not a transforming imagination.

  No man better understood the art of flattery and how to administer it with grace.

  He seizes anything frivolous, new, or convenient, on the wing; and his poetry is only a written conversation,—I mean the conversation which goes on at a ball, when people speak for the sake of speaking, lifting a lock of one’s wig, or twisting about a glove. Gallantry, as he confesses, holds the chief place here, and one may be pretty certain that the love is not over-sincere. In fact, Waller sighs on purpose (Sacharissa had a fine dowry), or at least for the sake of good manners; that which is most evident in his tender poems is, that he aims at a flowing style and good rhymes. He is affected, he exaggerates, he strains after wit, he is always an author…. Nevertheless Waller is usually amiable; a sort of brilliant light floats like a halo round his verses; he is always elegant, often graceful. His gracefulness is like the perfume exhaled from the world; fresh toilettes, ornamented drawing-rooms, the abundance and all those refined and delicate comforts give to the soul a sort of sweetness which is breathed forth in obliging compliments and smiles. Waller has such, and that most flattering, apropos of a bud, a girdle, a rose…. All his verses flow with a continuous harmony, clearness, facility, though his voice is never raised, or out of tune, or rough, nor loses its true accent, except by the worldling’s affectation, which regularly varies all tones in order to soften them. His poetry resembles one of those pretty, affected, bedizened women, busy in inclining their head on one side, and murmuring with a soft voice commonplace things which they cannot be said to think, yet agreeable in their beribboned dress, and who would please altogether if they did not dream of always pleasing.

  As a poet he is nothing but a rhetorician.

  Had he owned a larger and more sincere nature we might have had in him a great poet.

  -With the poems of Denham he [“Voltaire”] was greatly pleased; and of Waller, whose “Elegy on the Death of Cromwell,” he has translated into French verse, he speaks in terms of enthusiastic admiration, ranking him above Voiture, and observing that, “his serious compositions exhibit a strength and vigour which could not have been expected from the softness and fluency of his other pieces.”

  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; while we, who are taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of sound.

  When all claims and candidates have been considered, it is really to Edmund Waller that is due the “negative inspiration” (the phrase is borrowed from Sainte-Beuve) of closing up within bands of smoothness and neatness the wild locks of the British muse. He was the English Malherbe, and wrote with the same constitutional contempt for his predecessors.

  No poetical reputation has suffered such vicissitudes as that of Edmund Waller: described, in the inscription upon his tomb, as “inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps,” it was still possible, in 1766, to introduce him to the readers of the Biographia Britannica as “the most celebrated Lyric Poet that ever England produced.”… The revolt against classicism extinguished the reputation of Waller, as it impaired that of men in every way greater than he…. He is credited with having polished his poetry like marble, but his execution is frequently careless, and his ear was by no means exceptionally acute. He uses the feeble expletive “so” upwards of twenty times as a rhyme, and occasionally he is satisfied with an assonance. Of the “essence of poetry, invention,” he was practically destitute, but it would be difficult to find in the whole range of English Poetry any one more uniformly successful in improving an occasion. To many people his verses on this or that public occasion must have come as a relief, after the “conceited” obscurities of Donne. He makes no great demand on the understanding, he is singularly free from conceits, and his classical allusions are the most trite and ordinary…. The general level of Waller’s lyrical work is distinctly high.

  Waller’s powers would certainly be in higher repute, but for the trivial or transitory interests to which he gave them. The court poet pays dearly for his courtliness at last. He bestows the best of his experience upon perishable or unprofitable matter, and we are surprised rather than pleased to find not the fly in amber, but amber in the fly.

  Most of his poems are occasional, and many of them trivial in their immediate subject, but they are polished with the utmost care and good taste. His panegyrics and complimentary verses are graceful and often dignified.