field, and gave himself up to study. In the winter of that year he wrote another of his gazetteer poems, the piece On his Majesty's receiving the news of the Duke of Buckingham's death. In the choice of his subject Waller once more showed a tact which served him well with his own immediate public, but which has lost its charm for posterity. Buckingham, it will be remembered, had just breakfasted at Portsmouth, when Felton met him in the passage and stabbed him to the heart. Charles I. was only five miles off, at Southwick, and when Sir John Hippesley brought the news, he was still at morning prayer. The story current at the time, which Clarendon repeats and Waller versifies, is that the King, when the news was whispered to him, remained kneeling without change of countenance until the function was over.

"The sacred Wrestler till a blessing given

Quits not his hold, but halting conquers Heaven," says Waller, and deftly compliments the monarch at once upon his presence of mind and his tender

ness.

"Such huge extremes inhabit thy great mind, God-like unmoved and yet like Woman kind.”

Contarini, as quoted by Mr Gardiner, says that Charles did in fact show panic on his countenance,

but it seems certain that he did not stir till prayers were ended, when he rushed to his bedroom, flung himself on the bed, and gave way to a torrent of lamentations.

Waller's retirement into the country was identified with his sudden friendship for a remarkable man, George Morley, long afterwards Bishop of Worcester and then of Winchester. Waller had lately been admitted into that society of learned and wealthy persons which was known as Lord Falkland's club. At one of the meetings of this body a noise was heard in the street, and looking out of window the members saw a young man being arrested by bailiffs. They were told it was "a son of Ben Jonson," this being the name given to themselves by a group of young University wits who affected to be the poetical offspring of the author of Volpone. The debtor was brought in to the club, and proved to be a relation of Waller's own, George Morley, a penniless student of Christchurch, Oxford, as learned, witty, and needy as a man could be. Waller was charmed with his acquaintance, and the end of the meeting was that the poet persuaded the student to come down to Beaconsfield and share his retirement. This Morley did, and for ten years spent his life in the enjoyment of hospitality alternately with the

Wallers and with the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon. He lived to be a very old man, and under the Restoration rose in the Church to those episcopal dignities by which he is best known. But in these early days he was secular and humanistic in his proclivities, and it is said, and this is strongly confirmed by Lord Clarendon, that it was mainly due to him that Waller seriously undertook to cultivate poetry. It is certain that the ten years he spent with Waller were those in which the great bulk of that writer's verses were composed, and it may further be noticed, as a link in the chain of events, that Morley was the first cousin of Sir John Denham, who was to be Waller's earliest pupil in poetry.

Waller, on retiring from public life, left his mother in the family mansion in the town of Beaconsfield, and built for himself another, a quarter of a mile away, at Hallbarn. Here his wife died at the birth of their first child, and left him a widower at twenty-four. Morley was now his constant and chief companion, and with him he drowned grief and ambition for a year or two in a profound study of the writers of antiquity. He was first drawn out of his retirement by his public passion, if I may be allowed to use such a term, for the lady he addressed as Sacharissa, and whom

he believed that he had made as famous as Petrarch

made his Laura1.

Sacharissa was an after-thought for Dorothea, the name under which Waller originally celebrated the charms of Lady Dorothy Sidney, the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester. She was the grand-niece of that romantic Sir Philip Sidney who wrote the Arcadia and who died at Zutphen nearly thirty years before her birth, though when the latter event took place, Waller's commentator Fenton was unable to discover from the register at Penshurst. We may be sure that it was not much earlier than 1615, and that when Waller began to address her about 1632, she was still quite young2. The course of this true love, though so stately and imposing, was not much troubled, it would appear, by mundane temper.

emotion, of doubt, of terror

There is no trace of

There

on the lover's part.

1 Exactly a hundred years later, we find Sacharissa still named among the immortal ladies of poetic history. Elijah Fenton, in 1730, confidently sings:

"Secure beneath the wing of withering time,

Her beauties flourish in ambrosial prime;

Still kindling rapture, see! she moves in state;

Gods, nymphs and heroes on her triumph wait."

2 The card now (July 1885) attached to the beautiful portrait of her, by Vandyke, at Penshurst, says that she was born in 1617; but this seems to be conjectural. In this picture she appears as a lovely and buxom young shepherdess of about twenty.

The lady is cruel, the bard is despairing, and after the pompous suit has been carried on without incident of any kind for seven years, we find the lady suddenly falling in love with a real flesh-andblood young gentleman, of only nineteen summers, whom she promptly marries. It must be confessed that, as we shall presently see, nothing in the process of this suit became Waller so well as the manner in which he made his bow on abandoning it. In the meantime we must give ourselves to the examination of this, the most famous cycle of lovepoems which the seventeenth century possesses.

The moralists who ever and again remind us that the really great is the materially small, and that Athens and Weimar ruled the world of letters, may point if they will to the Sacharissa Poems as an example of the truth of their position. It is quite extraordinary to find when we sift these famous pieces from the body of Waller's writings, how slender a bundle they form. The immortality of the fair, the cruel, the disdainful Sacharissa hangs upon no more than ten direct poetical addresses, and about half as many indirect testimonies to her beauty and her scorn.

The long heroic poem, called The Battle of the Summer Islands, it is true, is dragged behind the car of the cruelty of Sacharissa by means of a few allusions