could make; he takes the low cedars which covered the islands to be cedars of Lebanon, and talks of the lofty cedar which to Heaven aspires:" while he promises to lull the savages with Sacharissa's name although there was not a single savage there to lull. Major-General Lefroy, however, seems to have overlooked the fact that the report that Waller visited Bermuda cannot have been set afloat by the fact that he wrote the Battle of the Summer Islands, from the simple circumstance that he represents himself in that poem not as having yet seen Bermuda, but as longing and hoping to do so.* My own belief is, that the astute Waller, having property on the islands, and having, as I should conjecture, embarked money in the company which was started in 1637, under the auspices of Governor Chaddock, wrote his heroic poem, and circulated it among wealthy and noble friends, as an advertisement. Until that time, passion, ambition, the urging sense of harmony or beauty, had inspired English heroic poems; but this was in future to be by no means de rigueur. Half a century later, when the *His words are : "O how I long my careless limbs to lay Under the Plantan's shade, and all the day Invoke the Muses, and improve my vein !" My conviction is that he no more reached Bermuda than George Herbert or Bishop Berkeley did. These islands have attracted much notice from English men of letters, but have proved difficult of access. Tom Moore reached them, but quitted them soon and eagerly. classical transformation was almost complete, Hobbes in his essay Concerning the Vertues of an Heroique Poem laid down as the first rule for its composition that it should possess "perspicuity and facility of construction." The heroic poems of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages,-The Barons' Wars of Drayton, the Albion's England of Warner, the Ovid's Banquet of Sense of Chapman, for instance,-had possessed various brilliant and touching qualities, irregular force and sudden brilliance of style, but certainly not what Hobbes means by "perspicuity and facility of construction." The Arcadia of Sidney is not facile, the Christ's Victory and Triumph of Giles Fletcher is not, in this sense, perspicuous, but Waller's Battle of the Summer Islands is, just as The Hind and the Panther of Dryden is perspicuous, and The Dunciad admirable for its facility of construction. Waller's little epic is a perfectly straightforward narration in three parts, the first containing a highlypitched description, the exaggerated fulsomeness of which irritates the historian of the Bermudas, of the commercial and natural advantages of that colony; the second containing an account of the stranding of the whales; and the third of the battle itself. Nothing could be pitched more definitely in the key of common-sense. We are told with scrupulous fidelity, the puff of the oranges and grapes and melons being finished,-what exactly happened on this curious occasion : "The Boat which on the first assault did go, Struck with a harping Iron the younger foe; Who, when he felt his side so rudely gored, Vext with unwonted heats, boils, flings about It is very difficult in reading these lines to realize that when they were written Dryden was an infant, and that the men were still in the prime of life who had known Shakespeare and had served him in the production of his romantic plays. In 1639, the year after the composition of The Battle of the Summer Islands, Lady Dorothy Sidney suddenly grew tired of hearing Waller 66 twang his tiresome instrument Above her unconcern," and she married Henry, Lord Spenser, who was presently created Earl of Sunderland. However young Sacharissa may have been when Waller first addressed her, she must have been by this time a good deal older than her bridegroom, who was only nineteen. After four short years of married life, her young husband was killed fighting for his King at the battle of Newbury, and Sacharissa settled down for forty years as a widow, devoting herself to the education of three children, and never losing sight of her old persistent poet-lover. There is a story extant to the effect that when they were both very old the Dowager Duchess of Sunderland rallied her friend by saying, "Ah! Mr. Waller, when will you make such beautiful verses about me again?" "Madam," said the poet, with more of gallantry, we must hope, in his eyes than in his words, when your ladyship is as young again!" But before we turn from the Sacharissa episode which has taken so prominent a part in the legend of Waller's life, we must quote the letter which he wrote to Lady Lucy Sidney, the younger sister, in July, 1639, when Sacharissa had just been married. "MADAM, "In this common joy at Penshurst I know none to whom complaints may come less unseasonable than to your Ladyship; the loss of a bed-fellow being almost equal to that of a mistress: and therefore you ought, at least, to pardon, if you consent not to, the imprecations of the deserted; which just heaven no doubt will hear ! 'May my Lady Dorothy, (if we may yet call her so,) suffer so much, and have the like passion for this young Lord, whom she has preferr'd to the rest of mankind, as others have had for her! And may this love, before the year go about, make her taste of the first curse impos'd on womankind, the pains of becoming a mother! May her first-born be none of her own sex! nor so like her, but that he may resemble her Lord as much as her self! "May she that always affected silence, and retiredness, have the house fill'd with the noise, and number, of her children; and hereafter of her grandchildren! and then, may she arrive at that great curse so much declin'd by fair Ladies, old age! May she live to be very old, and yet seem young; be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth! And when she shall appear to be mortal, may her Lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place, where we are told there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage; that being there divorced, we may all have an equal interest in her again! My revenge being immortal, I wish all this may also befall their posterity to the world's end, and afterwards! "To you, Madam, I wish all good things; and that this loss may in good time be happily supply'd with a more constant bed-fellow of the other sex. "Madam, I humbly kiss your hands, and beg pardon for this trouble, from “Your Ladyship's most humble servant, EDM. WALLER.' Among the poems which belong to the Sacharissa period, but show much more than the lyrics the classical tendency of Waller's taste, that Upon His Majesty's repairing of Paul's demands especial notice, because of its popularity, and the influence which it exercised upon younger minds. That Waller's poems circulated in MS. so widely as to enjoy positive popularity is proved by an allusion to this piece, which forms the earliest mention of Waller which I have been able to discover, and which preceded by three years the publication of the lines referred to. In the first anonymous edition of his Cooper's Hill, an edition in which the poet displayed the courage of his anonymity, Sir John Denham delivers himself of the following notable piece of criticism. He is standing on Cooper's Hill, and surveying the horizon, till he reaches the point where the cathedral cuts it "Paul's, the late theme of such a Muse whose flight Has bravely reached and soared above thy height; |