The next poem of Waller's to which we can supply a date, and in this case the application is certain, forms even a more curious and valuable text for criticism. I believe that the main reason of Waller's popularity and influence was the prosaic, the anti-imaginative, function which he conceived for poetry. It appeared to him that verse, and verse of a more precise kind than had hitherto been written in England, was a proper vehicle for the celebration of facts, public or private, of passing interest. This no one before his time had perceived, except a few Jacobean scribblers, devoid of art, like Taylor the Water poet, whose influence had been nil. It was distinctly an inspiration for a lad of eighteen, in the winter of 1623, when Ben Jonson and Chapman and Drayton were the poets most in vogue, resolutely to sit down without a model to write a long poem on the exciting incident of the moment, the danger Prince Charles had just escaped on his return voyage from Spain.

The occurrence is well remembered: Charles was rowing back by night from Santander to his own vessel, the "Prince," when the wind suddenly rose and very nearly swept the barge out to sea. Sir Sackville Trevor, on board the "Defiance," fortunately became aware of what was happening, and threw out ropes with lanterns attached to them,

one of which was caught by a rower on Charles's barge, and the "heroick Prince," as Waller calls him, was saved. It is very interesting to compare the poem with the published account of the incident; we see that the verses possessed, and were intended to possess, the lively actuality of a newsletter. The whole political situation is lightly touched, phase by phase; the Prince's gallant object in Spain, the diplomacy of Olivares, the dubious and coy position of the Infanta, the attitude of France, all are discussed in language which may seem florid to us, but which had the charm of novelty and reality to the gentlemen and ladies of James's court, among whom the verses were circulated in manuscript. I must be allowed to quote a few lines, as a specimen of the style of this interesting and vivacious poem. It is supposed that, during the peaceful moments that preceded the storm, while Charles was still riding through the streets of Santander amid the noise of bells and cannon, the sea-god Arion occupied himself in soliloquizing as follows regarding the ancestors of the god-like Prince :

"While to his harp divine Arion sings

The loves and conquests of our Albion kings,
Of the fourth Edward was his noble song,
Fierce, goodly, valiant, beautiful and young,

He rent the crown from vanquished Henry's head,
Raised the white rose and trampled on the red,
Till Love, triumphing o'er the Victor's pride,
Brought Mars and Venus to the conquered side."

The prosody of such lines as these is quite undistinguishable from that of the classic school from 1660 to the close of the seventeenth century. Dryden proceeded no further than this in the mere execution of the distich, and it was only in the hands of Pope that it received a further polish and rapidity. We find Waller here not merely turning off his serried couplets with complete ease and indifference, but surpassing in his earliest efforts what was done all through their lives by his more immediate pupils. Such writing as this, which Waller was master of in 1623, was not imitated by a single poet for nearly twenty years; yet he persisted in it, and lived to see the entire English Parnassus absorbed by it. We must admit that the man who could effect such a revolution, and show from youth to age so intrepid a consistency of manner, deserves the closest attention from the student of style.

It was consistent also with his isolated habit of mind that Waller does not seem to have consorted with any of the poets of his own youth. A rhetorical address to Ben Jonson goes far to prove that he

was not acquainted with the only writer who is mentioned in the poems of his youth and middle life. It has been assumed, on slender evidence, that Sir John Suckling translated into Latin one of the Sacharissa poems, the version being printed by Waller as his own. Less proof of Waller's association with his poetical peers could hardly be adduced, and Suckling was, after all, a golden swashbuckler of the gardens of Whitehall more than a person of letters. The truth seems to be that Waller held himself resolutely aloof from the contemporary literature of the age, and cultivated those dry distichs of his by some curious unsympathetic inspiration, the exact nature of which we shall never know.

His thoughts during these boyish days seem to have been politically ambitious. His great wealth drew him naturally to court, and in August, 1625, he sat in the House of Commons for another of the local Buckinghamshire boroughs, for Chipping Wycombe. Parliament met its new King on this first occasion at Oxford, and the boyish Waller, not yet of age, was a sharer, no doubt, in the panic regarding the plague and the grumbling about the noisome lodgings which occupied the short course of a session that must have seemed to him like a summer holiday. He little realized, we may be

sure, that he was witnessing the first throes of that mighty struggle in which the constitution of England was presently to be rent into shreds. Next February he represented Wycombe at Westminster, in Charles's second parliament, and the following year Amersham in the third.

In 1627 he came before the public in a very strange way. Ann, the daughter and sole heiress of a wealthy citizen of London of the name of Banks, appears to have attracted general attention by the combined charms of her appearance and her fortune. The Court itself took this interesting young person under its patronage, and deigned to discover a husband for an heiress so distinguished. This candidate for Miss Banks's hand was a courtier of the name of Crofts, whose suit was considered to be gained, when Waller, then aged two-andtwenty, coolly stepped in, and married the fair lady in the teeth of Whitehall. The Earl of Clarendon tells us that this incident caused Mr Waller to be famous to a degree which he had not attained by his wit, nor his fine parts, nor his poetry.

It is probable that it also caused him to be looked upon at Court with some degree of ill-will, for we learn that in 1628 he retired with his young wife into Buckinghamshire, to his house at Beacons