beware of the burning effect of a poet's breath upon a budding beauty, as upon an opening rose:

Still as I did the leaves inspire,

With such a purple light they shone,
As if they had been made of fire,

And spreading so, would flame anon:

All that was meant by air or sun,

To the young flower, my breath has done.12

So long as the incendiarism was confined to verse, they need not have taken alarm. Consider even the celebrated lines :

That which her slender waist confin'd,
Shall now my joyful temples bind;
No monarch but would give his crown,
His arms might do what this has done.

It was my heav'n's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer;
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move!

A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that 's fair;
Give me but what this ribband bound,
Take all the rest the sun goes round.13

For Waller, so perfect are the three stanzas, that, were all else of his lost, the whole essence of him would survive. But, like the rest, they are uninflammatory. Their luminousness actually by its defects stamps the piece as more ideally his. It less resembles cheerful sunlight than the dazzling reflection from Alpine snows.

His work lacks heat of its own; it is no emanation from head and heart combined. On the other hand, precision, lucidity, completeness of harmony between a conceit and its expression, are invariable qualities. The ability to whip cream out of the thinnest milk is amazing. The slighter

the subject—a slip on wet clay, a rouged cheek, the wedding of two dwarfs, an air on the lute-the fitter. A weighty thought required too much fining down. We almost see a real idea in the act of being ground down, pared, relieved of an excess of suggestiveness and boastful intellectuality. Poor thing! in as ill case as Mary of Modena, with nothing but a Royal wig to screen off all the King's Ministers from her bed! No allowance made for a delicate germ's modesty --the operator glorying in the exhibition of his remorseless skill!

An admirable artist-exulting in his dexterity-Edmund Waller had elected to be a poet; and is he? Well, take the Panegyric. That is a lofty, masculine declamation, abounding in rhetorical fire. It proves its author the master he unquestionably was of strong, pure, clear English. It indicates powers of expression which might have made him a commanding prose writer; perhaps an eminent orator. I am afraid I cannot perceive in it, and in other work of a similar order, the distinctive poetic vein. The love lyrics are refined in their moral tone; strangely so for the time at which their writer was born, and, yet more, for that into which he survived. They are irreproachable in rhythm, and as perfect in form and fashion as a Paris frock. To me all, with a single exception, want the nearly indescribable something which stamps essential poetry.

Still, the exception remains, and cannot-happily, cannot be explained away. Compare the brilliant Girdle lyric with:

Go, lovely Rose !

Tell her, that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

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 spy'd,
That had'st thou sprung

In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended dy'd.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retir'd ;
Bid her come forth,

Suffer herself to be desir'd,

And not blush so to be admir'd.

Then die! that she

The common fate of all things rare

May read in thee;

How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair! 14

Here we do

The fragrance in it-the atmosphere-the colour, issuing from inward warmth, and from inward life! not see with what admiration we may-the consummate artist in language and metres carving, filing, veneering, inlaying, polishing, and gilding. The fabric, to its dying close, seems to grow before our eyes, touched by a light, a glow, as strange-we will hope, as delightful-to poet as to reader.

If the singer did not develop the poetic soul-germ as nature had designed, I am afraid it must have been that he would not. He was far from contemptuous of a poet's renown; he hoped and expected to be venerated as one in future ages; he chose to be crowned at once by his own generation, and in a lady's boudoir. A poet, to be ranked among the great, ought to let himself go, to suffer the spirit to carry him whither it will. Waller, I suspect, was always on guard to repress the least symptom of divine madness. He had a horror of becoming ridiculous. Here is, I believe, a clue to the frigidity which numbs the

sympathy modern readers would gladly feel. I am not equally satisfied that it convicts his contemporaries of misplaced enthusiasm. As other creatures may possess faculties of which man has no conception, so it may be with other eras in literature. I confess to a suspicion sometimes, and a hope, that Waller's own period may have been endued with a poetic sensibility enabling it to find at the hearth of his sparkling wit a comfort beyond us. It is a curious question whether it appreciated the warmth as fully as the flame in the single instance in which we recognize in him the presence of both.

The Poems of Edmund Waller (Johnson's Poets, vol. xvi). 1790. 1 Upon Ben Jonson.

2 Of English Verse, v. 6.

3 Of the Fear of God, v. 50.

4 To my Lord of Leicester, v. 10.

5 of our late War with Spain.

Upon the Death of the Lord Protector.

A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, stanzas 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 11.

8 The Mutable Fair, vv. 63-6.

9 To Amoret.

To a Lady Singing a Song of his Composing, st. 2.

11 Thyrsis, Galatea.

13 On a Girdle.

12 The Bud.

14 Song.

SIR JOHN SUCKLING

1609-1642

SUCKLING'S was a short career, but eventful, passed in a blaze of notoriety. Son of a Secretary of State, he was born and bred in a Court, and early became a favourite of King Charles and Queen Henrietta. He inherited wealth, which he spent freely at the gaming table, and in the dissipations of fashionable life. His was a nature to carry him gaily into adventures, without sufficient sturdiness to see him safely through them. At the same time, it included enough elasticity for him to live down rebuffs. Thus a futile attempt to retrieve his embarrassed fortunes by a rich marriage brought him the disgrace of a cudgelling by a rival. The affront was not avenged by him; yet it neither clouded permanently his reputation as a gentleman, nor dashed his own self-confidence. He had served, with distinction, it is said, a campaign in Germany under Gustavus Adolphus. On the armed rising of the Scottish Covenanters under Lesley against the King's Church policy, he raised, at his own expense, a troop of horse. It ran away with the rest of the Royal Cavalry at Newburgh. Finally, having been a principal in a wild plot for the forcible rescue of Strafford from the Tower, he fled to France. In Paris, having used up his courage and hopefulness, as well as his estate, he ended his life, it is generally supposed, by suicide.

A scholar trained at Westminster and Trinity, and a wit, he played the author in the intervals of gallantry, gambling, soldiering, and political intrigues. A weighty epistle by him to Jermyn, afterwards Lord St. Albans, on the disputes