Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham | Page 2

men so far above moral
heroism and rugged mental force as Cromwell and Hampden, instead of
exciting emulation, led to envy, and that his divergence from their
political path sprung more from personal feeling than from principle.
He was educated, first, at the grammar school of Market, Wickham;
then at Eton; and, in fine, at King's College, Cambridge. Accounts vary
as to his proficiency--one Bigge, who had been his school-fellow at
Wickham, told Aubrey that he never expected Waller to have become
such an eminent poet, and that he used to write his exercises for him.
Others, on the contrary, have alleged that it was the fame of his
scholarship which led to his election for Agmondesham, a borough in

Bucks, when he was only sixteen years of age. This story, so far as his
premature learning goes, seems rather apocryphal; but certain it is, that
when scarcely eighteen, he had become M.P. for the above-mentioned
borough. The parliament in which he found himself, was one of those
subservient and cringing assemblies which James I. was wont to
summon to sit till they had voted the supplies, and then contemptuously
to dismiss. It met in November 1621, and after passing a resolution in
support of their privileges, which James tore out of the Journals with
his own hand, and granting the usual supplies, was dissolved on the 6th
of January 1622. Waller was probably as silent and servile as any of his
neighbours. He began, however, to feel his way as a courtier, and
overheard some curious and not very canonical talk of James with his
lords and bishops, the record of which reminds you of some of the
richer scenes of the "Fortunes of Nigel." The next parliament was not
called till 1624, when Waller was not elected. The electors of
Agmondesham, who had, meantime, obtained fuller privileges, chose
two matured members to represent them, and the precocious boy lost
his seat.
Waller's "political and poetical life began nearly together." It was in his
eighteenth year that he wrote his first poetical piece--that on the escape
of Prince Charles from a tempest on his return from Spain. It is a tissue
of smooth and musical mediocrity. It shews a kind of stunted
prematurity. The perfection which is attained by a single effort is
generally a poor and tame one. This poem of Waller's, like several of
his others, has all that merit which arises from the absence of fault, and
all that fault which arises from the absence of merit--of high poetic
merit, we mean, for in music it is equal to any of his poems. Much has
been said about the model which he followed in his versification, the
majority of critics tracing in it an imitation of Fairfax's Tasso. The fact
seems to be that Waller, with a good ear, had a very limited theory of
verse. He worshipped smoothness, and sought it at every hazard. He
preferred the Jacob of a soft flowing commonplace to the rough hairy
Esau of a strong originality, cumbered with its own weight and richness.
We think that this excessive love of the soft, and horror at the rude,
materially weakened his genius. The true theory of versification lies in
variety, and in accommodation to the necessities and fluctuations of the
thought. The "Paradise Lost," written in Waller's rhyme, would have

been as ridiculous as Waller's love to Saccharissa expressed in Milton's
blank verse. The school before Waller were too rugged, but surely there
is a medium between the roughness of Donne, and the honied
monotony of the author of the "Summer Islands." The practice of
running the lines into one another, severely condemned by Johnson,
and systematically shunned by Waller, has often been practised with
success by poets far greater than either--such as Shelley and Coleridge.
It is remarkable that Dryden, while he praised, did not copy our poet's
manner, but gave himself freer scope. Pope, on the other hand, pushed
his love of uniform tinkle and unmitigated softness to excess, and
transferred this kind of luscious verse from small poems, where it is
often a merit, to large ones, where it is a mistake. In his "Iliad," for
instance, the fierce ire of Achilles, the dignified resentment of
Agamemnon, the dull courage of Ajax, the chivalrous sentiment of
Hector, the glowing energy of Diomede, the veteran wisdom of Nestor,
the grief of Andromache, the love of Helen, the jealousy of Juno, and
the godlike majesty of Jupiter, are all expressed in the same sweet and
monotonous melody--a verse called "heroic," by courtesy, or on the
principle of contradiction, like lucus a non lucendo. In Waller, however,
his poems being all, without exception, rather short, you never think of
quarrelling with his uniformity of manner; and rise from his lines as
from