EDMUND WALLER. THOUGH Waller ranks among the poets, his importance is mainly derived from the singular combination of circumstances which gave him a prominence he would scarcely have earned. He was born rich, in 1605, and was nursed, as Clarendon expressed it, in Parliament, in which he sat before he was seventeen. His mother was a Royalist, but was related to Hampden and Cromwell. Waller took the Parliamentary side, but was caught in a plot to help the king, and was therefore imprisoned and fined £10,000. The next eleven years he spent in Paris in luxury, issuing his first volume of poems meanwhile. Cromwell, becoming Protector, allowed him to return to England in 1654, on which Waller published a gushing "Panegyric on the Lord Protector," and another on Cromwell's death. When Charles II. came to the throne Waller was to the fore with an equally gushing ode "Upon His Majesty's Happy Return." On Charles' remarking that it was not as good as the ode to Cromwell, the courtier had the wit to reply, "Poets, sire, succeed better in fiction than in truth." He entered Parliament, and soon became the funny man of the House. At his death, in 1687, in his eightythird year, Waller was regarded as a really good poet, if not a great one. The truth is, he was a master of the art of versification. He set the fashion of polished phraseology, making much showy verse out of small subjects and thin ideas. Occasionally a fine figure dignifies the piece, as this one, from the "Divine Poems:" "The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made." Waller dedicated his amatory poems to his "Saccharissa," Lady Sydney, daughter of the Earl of Leicester, whom he courted ardently, but in vain. His influence on verse-making, in the direction of polish and dignity, was admitted by Dryden and Pope. The musical flow of his lines is their principal charm. Go, LOVELY ROSE. Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her, that's young, And shuns to have her graces spied, In deserts, where no men abide, Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Suffer herself to be desired. And not blush so to be admired. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee, How small a part of time thy share OLD AGE And Death. THE seas are quiet when the winds give o'er; The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, That stand upon the threshold of the new. PANEGYRIC ON CROMWELL. WHILE with a strong and yet a gentle hand, Let partial spirits still aloud complain, Above the waves as Neptune showed his face, Your drooping country, torn with civil hate, The sea's our own; and now all nations greet, Heaven, that hath placed this island to give law, Whether this portion of the world were rent Hither the oppressed shall henceforth resort, THE Scope, utility, and fate of the satirist are well illustrated in the story of the author of "Hudibras." He was born in 1612, and after gaining an ordinary education he spent thirty years, first in the service of a lawyer, afterwards as secretary and companion in the mansions of the Countess of Kent and Sir Samuel Luke. The latter was a prominent Puritan and Parliament man, and served as model for the ludicrous figure of Hudibras, painted in undying colors by his disloyal servitor, who was an ardent royalist. Butler was in his fiftieth year when his satire was published. Whether the king rewarded the ridiculer of Puritanism with a gift of £300 and a political post, as is asserted, or whether it be true that Butler was allowed to pine in neglect is not clearly established. Certain it is that his wife's modest fortune was lost in bad investments, and that from the appearance of the first part of "Hudibras," in 1662, until his death, in 1680, two years after the issue of the third part, Butler lived in poverty, embittered by the pangs of hope deferred. Satirists make few friends. Butler wrote from experience when he suggested that Poets by their sufferings grow, As if there were no more to do To make a poet excellent, "Hudibras" is a burlesque of Don Quixote, as the work of Cervantes burlesques the old romances. Butler's purpose is to heap ridicule on the Puritans by fair means and foul, to make their doctrine ugly and their practice contemptible for its hypocrisy. The story relates the misadventures of Sir Hudibras and his squire as they set out to wage war against the amusements of the people. As a scathingly witty exposure of religious and political quackery the poem has remarkable strength. If its fun is elephantine in its movements, the quick play of fancy in the endless conceits which embody now profound sense, and now brilliant wit, intermingled with the quaintest bits of outlandish learning, redeems the poem as a whole from flatness, though it is impossible to read it as a whole. A larger proportion of the couplets in "Hudibras" has been absorbed in the common speech than from any other single composition. Its proverbial wit and wisdom are familiar to the multitude who never had the poem in their hands. Here and there occurs a fine thought, worthily expressed, but there is little poetry in the interminable string of ingenious and often whimsically forced rhymes. The poet employs the eight-syllabled line of the old rhymed romances. Butler survives in quotations, and as a gloomy figure, unhappy in his loneliness, the result of his misuse of high talents to vex instead of allaying the passions of those times, still troubled after the storm had passed. His prose writings include several masterly studies of public characters. THE ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND RELIGION OF HUDIBRAS. And made them fight, like mad or drunk, When gospel-trumpeter, surrounded With long-eared rout, to battle sounded, And pulpit, drum ecclesiastic, Was beat with fist, instead of a stick: Then did Sir Knight abandon dwelling, A wight he was, whose very sight would THE FOGOYTONAN HOSPITAL, NEW YORK, N. Y. |
