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organ-music. The side which the more eminent poet took in politics separated him still more from those who, in the far greater majority, were the supporters of literature, and when he began, in his own words, at the summons of God's secretary, Conscience, to "embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes," he was himself taken away from the sphere of poetical composition for eighteen laborious years. So that Milton's noble figure will accompany us all down the course of our inquiry, but at a distance, neither approving nor disapproving,—the restless and irritable temper of the age through which he lived being, as little as that of the age into which he was born, sympathetic to his peculiar serenity of mind, the mind that would not condescend to little things.

WALLER AND SACHARISSA.

WALLER AND SACHARISSA.

IN that treasury of obsolete opinion and indispensable data, the Biographia Britannica, as published in the year 1766, we find the following startling sentence:-" Edmund Waller, the most celebrated Lyric Poet that England ever produced." If we remark that this confident judgment was expressed in so authoritative a quarter more than a century and a half after the birth of the poet for whom such supremacy was claimed, and that the readers of this phrase were divided from Waller as far as we ourselves are from such old-fashioned poets as Akenside and Falconer, we may well be disposed to marvel at the duration of a fame that has been thoroughly eclipsed at last. Nay more, we may surely feel a curiosity to discover what it was about this half-forgotten poet which can have impressed the public for more than a hundred

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