years with a sense of his magnitude and importance. And, indeed, the inquiry which we are now engaged in making into the phenomena which attended the great change from romantic to classical poetry in England can only be carried out by giving due and careful attention to the career and character of a lyric poet who reigned supreme until the classical taste declined, and who has been discarded ever since the romantic taste revived.

In our last chapter we saw what elements were collected to form the body of English poetry in the decline of such phases of the Renaissance as had reached our shores. In the general disorganization and solution of the old forms of romantic poetry, there was needed an astringent which should brace the textures and condense the solids of literature. In the great romance of Rabelais, we find Ponocrates purging Gargantua with the hellebore of Anticyra to make him forget all that his other masters had taught him'. This harsh restorative, this herbal secret of forgetfulness, was presented to English poetry in the nick of time by what we must be allowed to call, for want of a

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· Lequel le purgea canonicquement auec elebore de Anticyre, et, par ce medicament, luy nettoya toute l'alteration et peruerse habitude de cerveau."-Gargantua i. 23.

better term, the genius of Waller. While the function of most leaders of literature is to refresh and extend the mind, to explore new fields of beauty, to throw the windows of the soul wide open to fresh airs from the world of nature, it was Waller's duty to capture and imprison the imagination, to seize English poetry by the wings, and to shut it up in a cage for a hundred and fifty years, to win a position as the leader of imaginative literature by narrowing its scope and rigidly reducing its resources.

Of late years, ever since the beginning of the present century, indeed, it has been customary to disregard entirely the position claimed and won by this remarkable man. It may easily be conceded. that his is not a sympathetic figure; but the time has surely passed when we can reject writers from their stations in the evolution of literature because their writings or their characters are unalluring to ourselves. Here is a man of whom, after the lapse of a century and a half, it still seemed a commonplace to say that he was the most celebrated lyric poet that England ever produced; we may reject him as we will, we cannot allow ourselves to deny that his historic position is of the very highest interest. We must examine his career with attention, that we may discover what

there was about the man himself which could subjugate his own contemporaries with so strong a spell, and his writings, that we may find out what it was in them that appealed to generation after generation as something more elegant and captivating than the poetry of Shakespeare, of Spenser, and of Milton1.

Edmund Waller was singularly fortunate in his birth and extraction. In the reign of James I., among so many upstart dukes and earls, he possessed the dignity of a wealthy country gentleman ennobled by a long line of honourable landed ancestors. The family tree of the Wallers was a flourishing and stately vegetable at least as far back as the reign of Henry VI. A very distant progenitor, a Mr Richard Waller of Spendhurst, had enjoyed the charge of that noble prisoner, Charles of Orleans, after the battle of Agincourt, and some vestige of the influence of the indefatigable and indolent maker of rondeaux may have descended from father to son. At that time, and long afterwards, the family estates were in Kent, but towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth we find them situated in the heart of

1 "Inter poetas sui temporis facile princeps," says the inscription at Beaconsfield, though Herrick, Milton and Dryden were "sui temporis."

Buckinghamshire. Mr Robert Waller lived at Amersham, or, as it was then spelt, Agmondesham, a borough, even then decayed, seated upon Milton's little classic river Missbourn,

When he wished to marry, Mr Waller went a few miles westward to the village of Hampden, near Princes Risborough, where Mr John Hampden, of that ilk, enjoyed a position very similar to his own, and where he received the hand of his daughter. Mr Hampden possessed a young son, who then, and for a long time afterwards, was conspicuous only for his "jolly conversation" and for his warm pursuit of field-sports, but who is now known to all the world as the famous patriot John Hampden. By the means of this marriage, it will be observed, the Wallers became connected with the family of Cromwell, and thus even before his birth those social complications began which were so to vex the trimming spirit of the poet.

As the nephew of John Hampden and the cousin of Oliver Cromwell, then, Edmund Waller was born into the world on the 3rd of March, 1605, at a country-house belonging to his father, and called Coleshill, which was then in a fragment of Herts, but is now absorbed again into Buckinghamshire. As he grew up at this house, the child

was within an easy walking distance of all the little boroughs which were to be identified with him in mature life: Amersham, which he was to represent in parliament; Wycombe, where he was to live and dispense hospitality; Beaconsfield, where he was to die and to be buried. A pastoral and woodland country, watered by little rivers flowing southward to the Thames, and hallowed to us all by more sentimental association with the greater names of Milton and Gray, yet not so characteristic of the writings of those high-flying spirits as of the graceful, precise, and mundane poetry of Waller.

The poet's father made thrifty use of the large fortune which descended to him, and when he died, which was during Edmund Waller's infancy, he left his only son an income of £3,500 a year, a property which was nursed by his careful mother all through his childhood and youth. The consequence was, that when Waller came of age he was in possession of one of the most splendid private fortunes in the country, nor until the end of his long life did all his crosses and vicissitudes prevent the money from gathering under his feet wherever his fate pursued him. There never was a child so plainly born with the traditional silverspoon in his mouth as Waller, and since the world