EDMUND, a conspicuous improver of English versification, was born at Coleshill in Hertfordshire, on the third of March 1605. He was the son of Robert Waller of Agmondesham in Buckinghamshire, and the nephew of John Hampden, whose name has been transmitted to posterity by means very different from those employed by his kinsman. Waller's mother was the cousin of Oliver Cromwell; and he could trace his pedigree from Richard Waller of Spendhurst, the sheriff of Kent, who took the duke of Orleans prisoner at the battle of Agincourt. While he was yet an infant, his father died, leaving him three thousand five hundred pounds a year, which in those days was a splendid fortune. He was sent by his mother first to Eton, and then to King's College, Cambridge; but we find him converted into a senator, and frequenting the court of James the First, in the sixteenth, or, as others say, the eighteenth year of his age.

About the same period of life he is supposed to have written his first poem, "On the danger his Majesty (being prince) escaped in the road at St. Andero." The prince landed at Portsmouth in 1623, when Waller was in his eighteenth year; but, whenever the poem was begun, it could not have been finished until two years afterwards; for he predicts the marriage of Charles with Henrietta of France, and it belonged to the bards of a more remote age to prophecy any events but such as had already happened, or never afterwards occurred. The numbers of this production are as musical as those of his last; and if the sense had always been completed in every couplet, few rhymes of the present day could better satisfy the public ear. "We have our lineal descendants and clans," says Dryden, in the preface to his Fables, "as well as other families: Spenser more than once intimates that the soul of Chaucer was transmuted into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Milton has acknowledged to me that Spenser was his original; and many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he derived the harmony of his numbers from the God- frey of Bulloign, which was turned into English by Mr Fairfax." Waller's second poem was written on the occasion "Of his Majesty receiving the Duke of Buckingham's Death." The duke was assassinated by Felton in 1628, and "the steadiness," as Johnson observes, "with which the king received the news in the chapel deserved indeed to be rescued from oblivion." There are few persons, however, who have not had frequent occasion to admire the philosophic composure with which some of their friends can listen to the calamities of others. There is sufficient internal evidence to demonstrate that this poem has no better pretensions than its predecessor to be considered a hasty effusion of fancy. He was indeed incapable of producing anything on the spur of the occasion. The duke of Buckinghamshire told Fenton, that he spent the greater part of a summer in composing and correcting ten lines to be written in a copy of Tasso belonging to the duchess of York.

Waller now pursued an earthly mistress, who suffered herself to be more speedily overtaken than the Muse. When still very young, he obtained the hand of Miss Banks, a rich city heiress, in opposition to the addresses of Mr Crofts, whose suit was backed by the influence of the court. By this lady he had two children, a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter, who afterwards became the wife of one Mr Dormer of Oxfordshire. When Waller was about twenty-five years of age, his wife died in giving birth to a child, whether the one last mentioned does not appear.

A rich young widower is more easily reconciled to the loss which he has sustained, than one who is left in solitary indigence to pine away the evening of his days. Looking about for another wife, or perhaps only for a poetical mistress, Waller fixed his eyes on the Lady Dorothea Sidney, the eldest daughter of the earl of Leicester. He began to celebrate this lady in verse under the absurd name of Sacharissa; but his tuneful gallantry is said to have been rewarded with contempt, for which he took a severe though late revenge. Meeting accidentally with Waller after she had become a wrinkled widow, she asked him, with senseless and indelicate jocularity, when he proposed to write some more verses to her? "When you are as young, madam," he answered, "and as handsome as you were."

After this disappointment, Apollo laid the following injunction on the slighted bard:

On you aged tree Hang up thy lute, and tie thee to the sea.

Fenton supposes it possible that he may have diverted his chagrin by accompanying the earl of Warwick to the Bermudas; and the knowledge of whale-fishing as practised by the inhabitants of that archipelago, displayed in his Battle of the Summer Islands, lends some strength to this conjecture. This poem, whether a record of experience, or an effort of imagination, is so unhappy both in the design and execution, that it is difficult to determine whether the poet is in jest or earnest. From 1629 to 1640 no parliament was assembled, and Waller spent a great part of that interval in prosecuting his studies, which were directed by Mr Morley, afterwards bishop of Winchester. He continued to produce various pieces; but to ascertain the precise order in which they were written, is of as little interest or utility as to be informed which was the third, fourth, or fifth bullet that was cast in some particular mould. In other poets it is curious to watch the progress of excellence; but Waller's powers arrived at sudden maturity, and remained unimpaired to the last; his first poetical essays exhibit none of the tasteless crudities of youth, and it is not easy to believe that his latest efforts were the children of decrepitude.

Having forgotten the cruelty of Sacharissa, he married a lady of such inferior celebrity that it is not known whether her name was Bresse or Breaux. It is however certain that she made him the father of thirteen children, five sons and eight daughters. In the parliament of 1640 he stood up in his place and opposed the king's demand of a supply. In his speech, which still remains, Johnson remarks that he quotes Hooker in one passage, and copies him in another, without acknowledgment; a proceeding resembling that of one who should borrow a sum of money from a man, and afterwards pick his pocket. Notwithstanding the vehemence of this harangue, the king is said to have sent to him second his demand of some subsidies for the payment of the troops. Waller was not sufficiently flattered by this distinction to decline undertaking the prosecution of Sir Francis Crawley, one of the twelve judges who had declared that ship-money might be legally and equitably exacted from the subject. This was an employment worthy the nephew of Hampden, and he executed his task with great dignity and vigour. The most brilliant passage of a very eloquent speech, which he delivered upon that occasion, is the one in which he compares the atrocious villany of enslaving and beggaring the nation, under pretence of supplying the navy, to the barbarity of seething a kid in his mother's milk; an act of inhumanity which the Mosaic law forbids, and which is understood to mean the employing for the destruction of any creature what was intended for its preservation. Crawley escaped unpunished; but Waller's speech was so much admired that twenty thousand copies were sold in one day. Though a friend of reform, both civil and ecclesiastical, Waller was no enemy either to the church or the king; for he spoke in favour of episcopacy, and when Charles took up arms against his subjects, he sent him a thousand broad pieces. But in times like those, the loyalty or patriotism of timid contemplation could be of small service either to a tyrant or a mob; and it was of little consequence whether a faltering voice muttered prerogative or privilege.

We have seen Waller perform the part of a public accuser; he has now to appear in the character of an object criminal. In an evil hour he turned plotter against the parliament. Being one of the commissioners appointed to treat with Charles at Oxford after the battle of Edgehill, the king said some kind things to him, which are supposed to have melted his heart, and given rise to the abortive scheme called Waller's Plot; or perhaps his loyalty, wavering as it was, was transmitted to him by his mother, who, although the sister of Hampden, was so zealous a royalist, that her kinsman Cromwell, half jesting and half serious, made her a prisoner to her own daughter in her own house. This plot of Waller's, which, as Hume says, might with more propriety be called a project, was a secret association of persons disgusted with the violence of the commons, to communicate with those of their own principles, who, when their strength was united, might, as they hoped, be enabled to make a stand against the progress of treason, by petitioning for peace, and refusing to contribute to the support of the parliamentary forces. The probability of success in this undertaking Waller was in the habit of discussing with his brother-in-law Tomkyns, who was clerk of the queen's council. Lord Conway, who had served in the army, was one of their confederates, and, as Clarendon supposes, might possibly have harboured some ulterior design of an appeal to the sword; but, as far as Waller was concerned, the scheme was of a nature purely civil, and such as might have been attempted with perfect safety at any other period. Infant anarchy however is still more jealous and malignant than superannuated despotism. About the same time that Waller's plans were discovered, there came to light an enterprise of a more martial aspect, projected by Sir Nicholas Crispie, who had obtained from the king a commission of array, transmitted to London by Lady Aubigny. Of these two unconnected schemes it was not difficult to make one direful confederacy.

Of the discovery of Waller's plot two distinct accounts are given. Clarendon relates that a conference between Waller and Tomkyns was overheard by a servant of the Waller, who carried the information thus obtained to Pym, one of Waller's relations, who lived in his family, left behind him a manuscript, in which it is stated that "he was betrayed by his sister Price," and her presbyterian chaplain Milwood, who stole some of his papers; and if he had not strangely dreamed, the night before he was seized, that his sister had betrayed him, and therefore burnt the rest of his papers by the fire left in his chimney, he had certainly lost his life for it." Whether discovered by the unnatural perversity of a sister, or the ordinary rascality of a domestic, the plot was published, with every embellishment that could excite surprise and terror. On Wednesday the 31st of May 1658, when a solemn fast was held in St Margaret's church, Westminster, a breathless messenger rushed among the congregation, and delivered a letter to Pym, who read it, looked aghast, whispered to some of the members of the congregation, and left the church, accompanied by those to whom the awful secret was divulged. On the night of that day Waller and Tomkyns were apprehended. Nature had wished from these associates one quality, without which a detected conspirator cuts a figure truly despicable. Perhaps the old adage, that the greatest rogue is the first to turn king's evidence, is susceptible of some amendment. Experience has proved that in desperate coalitions the blood of its comrades is more frequently sold by the greatest coward than by the greatest villain of the gang. In the hope of merit, Tomkyns was willing to sacrifice the life of Sir Nicholas Crisp, that famous London merchant, who raised a hundred thousand pounds for the king at its utmost need, and fought at the head of a regiment with his own indefatigable loyalty had embodied. The commission of array Tomkyns had been sent with the appointed token to receive from Lady Aubigny, who knew nothing of the nature of the document with which she had been intrusted. He had buried it in his garden, where, in consequence of his information, it was found, and thus was the thrilling enterprise of Crisp identified with the tame cabal of Waller. As for him, he was seized with the most acute paroxysms of terror, under the influence of which he blubbered out all, and perhaps more than he knew. No malignant witch in a dark room, the chosen residence of ghosts and goblins, ever petitioned with more frantic importunity for enlargement. He confessed not only his own delinquencies in thought, word, and deed, but all that he had seen, heard, or suspected of others; he divulged even the confidential prattle of women; and, for the privilege of passing the remainder of his days in penury and shame, would doubtless have consigned the whole of his associates to perdition. Lord Conway and the earl of Portland were his confederates in this disastrous scheme; and, to complete the sum of his degradation, he wrote a letter to the earl, imploring him, with all the eloquence of fear, to secure their mutual safety by becoming as mean a traitor as himself. To the hopes of the peacemakers, his lordship treated this proposal with contempt. Being unable to find a partner in ignominy, Waller now endeavoured to excite compassion and gain time by counterfeiting madness, as Clarendon says, or, according to the historian of the parliament, the deepest remorse of conscience. To the ghostly counsel of the ministers he listened with every appearance of edification, and rewarded their spiritual services with profuse liberality. No corruptible person who had the smallest influence on his fate went without a bribe. These desperate struggles were at length successful. In the pitiful palinode which he spoke before expulsion from the house, among many other moving things, he said, "I am of a stock which hath born you better men." But this touching appeal made little impression on hearers, and he owed his deliverance, not to his eloquence, but to his purse. Nor could he reasonably expect much favour at the hands of the commons. He had remained in parliament against his own inclination, by the express command of the king, and was in the habitual practice of exasperating the members by venting the most distasteful sentiments. Clarendon and Whitlocke are at issue on the mode of his deliverance; the former stating that he was tried by the parliament, according to the earnest prayer of a speech contained in his works, and the other that he was delivered over to the council of war, by which he was condemned to death, but reprieved by Essex, the leader of the parliamentary forces, and was suffered, after one year's imprisonment, to depart into another country, upon paying a fine of ten thousand pounds. However his release was effected, it cost him the whole of his honour, and more than a moiety of his estate.

Waller now proceeded to France; and, judging that the best way to stop the mouth of ridicule was to fill it full of dainties, he kept open house, and gave sumptuous entertainments. His favourite daughter Margaret, who afterwards acted as his amanuensis, was born at Rouen in Normandy. Soon after his exile commenced, he received a letter from an English lady, whose name has not been discovered, desiring him to collect his poems and send them to her from France. With this request he complied, and they were published in London in 1648. The splendid ostentation in which he lived terminated in humiliating embarrassments, to which he had been very little accustomed. He was compelled to part with his wife's jewels; and having nothing left, as he said, but the rump-jewel, he desired his brother-in-law, Colonel Scroope, to solicit permission from Cromwell to return. This boon was granted; and when he arrived in England, he went to live upon the remains of his fortune at Hallbarn, a place near Beaconsfield, where his mother resided. The protector recognised him as a relation, and, according to Waller's own account, used to lay aside the mask of hypocrisy in his society. His condescension was not thrown away, for Waller testified his gratitude by producing in 1654 the celebrated "Panegyric to the Lord Protector," which has always been considered his masterpiece. The panegyric was followed by a poem on the war with Spain, in which he advises the nation to decorate the head of Cromwell with a crown made of Spanish gold. When that crafty head was laid low, Waller was ready with an epicedium. Cromwell could now neither benefit nor injure him; but the verses were probably produced before his son Richard withdrew into that obscurity which was his natural element. If this poem is a labour of love, it is valuable on that account alone; it is very short, begins with common-place, and ends with hyperbole. Nature is always supposed by poets to be convulsed when great spirits pass away, and it happened to be rough weather when Oliver died, a circumstance of which Waller has taken a very feeble advantage; but that the goddess should heave one tremendous sigh, that should dispatch the waves as messengers of woe to distant climes, is the conception of frigid extravagance. When Charles appeared, Waller's song of triumph was not withheld. The verses "to the King upon his Majesty's happy Return," Charles told Waller that he thought inferior to the panegyric upon Cromwell. "Poets, Sir," replied he, "succeed better in fiction than in truth." During the whole of this reign, Waller represented different places in parliament, and his moments of relaxation were passed in the most brilliant society. His colloquial powers must have been great; for although he never tasted wine, his approach was hailed with delight by the most debauched wits of the court. Saville said that no man in England should keep him company without drinking.

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1 This is probably the woman whom Cromwell appointed to stand sentry over her mother. 2 The panegyric on Cromwell is partly translated into French verse in Hennet's Poétique Anglaise, tom. iii. but Ned Waller. "It is thought," says Percival Stockdale, "that St Evermond returned to England for the sake of Mr Cowley's company and Mr Waller's."

His life passed thus agreeably away, until, in 1665, he was urged, by the desire of augmenting his income, now reduced to £1300 a year, to petition the king for the provostship of Eton College. His application to Charles was successful; but Clarendon refused to affix his seal to the patent, upon the ground that none but clergymen were eligible to the office. Waller had no idea of private friendship being sacrificed to public duty, and this declaration of Clarendon's dissolved an intimacy of ancient date. Two years afterwards, when the chancellor was impeached, Waller's animosity was as fresh as ever, and he rushed among a crowd of assailants to strike an eager and superfluous blow at falling greatness. After Clarendon's banishment, the provostship was again vacant, and Waller again applied for the office; but the highest legal authorities declared that laymen were excluded by the act of uniformity, and the king said that he could not reverse a law of his own making. Some trifling dramatic efforts of Waller's have yet to be noticed. He wrote anew the last act of Beaumont and Fletcher's Maid's Tragedy, altering the catastrophic, and distinguishing his work from that of the confederate dramatists by rhyming verse. Southernne stated to Fenton, that he had seen the Maid's Tragedy acted about the end of Charles's reign, but without Waller's alterations. This is not to be wondered at; for in the heterogeneous condition to which he reduced it, the play was unfit for representation. A mean version of the first act of Corneille's Pompey, of which Lord Buckhurst translated the remainder, is attributed to Waller; and he is said to have been associated with Cowley in the original concoction of that overpraised performance, the Rehearsal.

When James ascended the throne in 1685, Waller was chosen member for Saltash in Cornwall. Being now eighty years of age, he wrote "A Presage of the Ruin of the Turkish Empire, presented to his Majesty King James the Second, on his Birth-day." From the perusal of Tasso, Waller had been inspired with great veneration for the champions of the cross, and feasted his imagination with the childish whimsy of a new crusade. His last poems are on sacred subjects. The chief of these are, "Of Divine Love, a poem in six cantos;" "Of the Fear of God, in two cantos;" "Of Divine Poesy, in two cantos." Having completed this pious task, he began to prepare for death, whose approach he contemplated with a serenity that could not have been expected from him. When life was worth preserving, Waller clung to it with the energy of despair; but when the scene grew dark and comfortless, he quitted it with decent grace. Observing that his legs began to swell, he asked Sir Charles Scarbrough, the king's physician, what that symptom portended. "Why, Sir," said he, "your blood will run no longer." By the appalling disclosure thus abruptly made, Waller was so little terrified that he repeated some lines from Virgil, and went home to await his dissolution, which happened on the 21st of October 1687. He was buried at Beaconsfield, where a monument was erected by the executors of his second son Edmund, who inherited the family estate, his elder brother being a sort of changeling. Besides these, Waller left other three sons.

Waller's character may be partly discovered in his poems. He inquires what ancient bard would not have deduced the pedigree of the first Charles from heaven; the power and piety of Cromwell he traces to the same source. The rising sun, in compassion to the weakness of mortal eyes, "first gilds the clouds," but the full majesty of the merry monarch burst upon his dazzled vision all at once. When this orb of glory is obscured, he pays James the Second the original and appropriate compliment of having restored the golden age. Irritable men are often good-natured, but Waller was equally peevish and malignant. His resentment of contradiction was not found by his associates to be a mere passing cloud; and his conduct to Clarendon demonstrates that revenge was welcome to him, even at the eleventh hour. Atterbury has accused him of literary envy; and the following passage in one of his letters must have been dictated either by malice or stupidity. "The old blind schoolmaster, John Milton, hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man; if its length be not considered as merit, it has no other." Of his shameful timidity enough has been already said. To counterbalance these defects, Waller was a good orator, an elegant poet, and an agreeable companion. It is said that he wished every verse of his expunged that did not imply some motive to virtue. His writings, in that case, would be very much defaced; but he cannot be denied the praise of having written with decorum in a licentious age, and with elegance and smoothness, when the numbers of most of his brother poets were nearly as vicious and irregular as the mode of life which they delighted to illustrate.