He wrote a large number of short works, devotional and controversial; a 'collection' of his noncontroversial books, epistles, and papers,' published in 1716, fills a volume of nearly eight hundred pages. Others than Quakers have admitted that some of them display true spiritual genius. Nayler's 'Last Testimony, said to be delivered by him about two Hours before his Departure out of this Life,' was versified by Bernard Barton, but the paraphrase added nothing to the fervour, tenderness, and dignity of the original:

There is a Spirit which I feel, that delights to do no Evil nor to revenge any Wrong, but delights to endure all things in hope to enjoy its own in the End: Its hope is to outlive all Wrath and Contention, and to weary out all Exaltation and Cruelty, or whatever is of a Nature contrary to it self. It sees to the End of all Temptations: As it bears no Evil in it self, so it conceives none in Thoughts to any other: If it be betrayed it bears it; for its Ground and Spring is the Mercies and Forgiveness of God. Its Crown is Meekness, its Life is Everlasting Love unfeigned, and takes its Kingdom with Intreaty and not with Contention, and keeps it by Lowliness of Mind. In God alone it can rejoyce, though none else regard it or can own its Life. It's conceived in Sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at Grief and Oppression. It never rejoyceth but through Sufferings; for with the World's Joy it is murthered. I found it alone, being forsaken; I have Fellowship therein, with them who lived in Dens and desolate Places in the Earth, who through Death obtained this Resurrection and Eternal Holy Life.

Edmund Waller,

a courtly poet whose works have much of the smoothness and polish of modern verse, was born in 1606 at Coleshill, near Amersham (in Bucks since 1832, but then in Hertfordshire), and in his infancy was left heir to an estate of £3500 per annum. He was cousin to the patriot Hampden, and his uncle's wife was aunt to Oliver Cromwell, but his own family were hearty royalists. The poet, educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, was apparently Roundhead or royalist as best suited the occasion. He entered Parliament at sixteen. At twenty-five he married a rich heiress of London, who died soon after, and he immediately became a suitor of Lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester. To this proud and peerless fair one Waller dedicated the best part of his poetry, and the groves of Penshurst echoed to the praises of his Sacharissa. But Lady Dorothea was inexorable, and bestowed her hand on the Earl of Sunderland. Meeting Waller long afterwards, Sacharissa asked him when he would again write such verses upon her. 'When you are as young, madam, and as handsome as you were then,' the ungallant poet replied, giving us therein a key to his witty, shallow, selfish character. As a member of Parliament he was distinguished as a speaker on the popular side, and was chosen to conduct the prosecution against Judge Crawley for his opinion in favour of levying ship

money (1641). His speech for the impeachment was printed, and 20,000 copies of it sold in one day. But he seems to have really been royalist in heart. He was one of the commissioners sent to the king at Oxford in 1643; and having joined in a plot to surprise the city militia and let in the king's forces, was arrested, expelled the House, and tried. He behaved in an abject manner, confessed freely to the injury of his associates, and had a sentence of death commuted to a fine of £10,000 and banishment. He lived in France and Switzerland, travelled with Evelyn, and was popular amongst the royalist exiles for his hospitality as well as for his wit. He was allowed to return in 1652, and wrote a panegyric on Cromwell, which seems one of his sincerest as it is certainly one of his best poems. After Cromwell's death, however, he wrote verses On the death of the late Usurper O. C. The Commonwealth fell to pieces under Richard Cromwell, and Waller was ready with a congratulatory address to Charles II. The royal offering was considered inferior to the panegyric on Cromwell, and when the king himself who admitted the poet to terms of courtly intimacy-commented on this inferiority, 'Poets, sire,' replied the witty, self-possessed poet, 'succeed better in fiction than in truth.' In the first Parliament summoned by Charles, Waller sat for Hastings, and he served in all the Parliaments of that reign, and Bishop Burnet admits he was the delight of the House of Commons; and in spite of his water-drinking, he was a great favourite at court. But Clarendon frustrated his scheme to be made Provost of Eton though a layman; and if Waller sought to revenge himself after that Minister's fall in 1667, the fallen Minister had his final revenge in the portrait he has left of Waller's cowardice and meanness. At the accession of James II. in 1685, the aged poet, then well-nigh eighty, was elected representative for a borough in Cornwall. The issue of James's mad career in seeking to subvert Church and constitution was foreseen by this wary and sagacious observer: 'He will be left,' said he, 'like a whale upon the strand.' The editors of Chandler's Debates and the Parliamentary History ascribe to Waller a remarkable speech against standing armies, delivered in the House of Commons in 1685; but according to Lord Macaulay, this speech was really made by Windham, member for Salisbury. 'It was with some concern,' adds the historian, 'that I found myself forced to give up the belief that the last words uttered in public by Waller were so honourable to him.' Waller purchased a small property at Coleshill, with the feeling that 'he would be glad to die like the stag, where he was roused.' The wish was not fulfilled; he died at Hall Barn, Beaconsfield, his home for fiftysix years, on 21st October 1687; and in the churchyard-where also rest the ashes of Edmund Burke-a monument was erected to his memory.

Waller's poems comprise an early epic on the Summer's Islands, or Bermudas, and a serious

poem on Divine Love, written in his later years; but most of his things are short and occasional, about a half of the whole being the elegant but artificial love-verses to Sacharissa. His verses were widely circulated, but not published till 1645-again in 1664. His feeble character is reflected in his poetry, which is easy, flowing, polished, and felicitous, but lacking in sincerity, passion, or strength. With various modifications of his own, he revived the heroic couplet, and handled it dexterously in the form it retained for over a hundred years. In his own time he was ranked next to or the equal of his younger contemporary Cowley, and at his death was accounted the greatest of English poets. In 1729 Fenton called him 'maker and model of melodious verse.' 'Dryden said that the excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr Waller taught it: he first made writing save an art, first showed us to conclude the sense most commonly in distichs.' His predecessors in writing heroic rhyming verse frequently made the sense outrun the couplet: Waller (though it has been proved that Sandys and others before him used the distich in the same way) established the more regular French fashion, and was by-and-by followed by Denham, and then by Dryden and by Pope. Of Waller it may be said that he was herald of the classical school in forsaking the Elizabethan conceits for reiterated antithesis, in which Dryden and Pope were again followers of Waller. Pope praised Waller's sweetness; Gray and Johnson were hostile critics; and since Cowper's time Waller has perhaps been unduly belittled, even by writers who are wont to praise style in manner more than strength or vehemence in thought. His love-ditties are frigid, no doubt; but many of his shorter poems show a real, if slender, gift of true song.

His method of using rhyming couplets is well shown in one of his very first poems, written about 1623, on the difficulty Charles I. (then prince) had, on his return from Spain in that year, in getting on board the English fleet awaiting him at Santander. A gale of wind, with a thunderstorm and heavy rain, made the passage in a barge difficult and even dangerous.

Of the Danger His Majesty escaped in the Roads at St Andrews.

These mighty peers placed in the gilded barge,
Proud with the burden of so brave a charge,
With painted oars the youths begin to sweep
Neptune's smooth face and cleave the yielding deep;
Which soon becomes the seat of sudden war
Between the wind and tide that fiercely jar.
As when a sort of lusty shepherds try
Their force at football, care of victory
Makes them salute so briskly, breast to breast,
That their encounters seem too rough for jest ;
They ply their feet, and still the restless ball,
Tossed to and fro, is urged by them all :

So fares the doubtful barge 'twixt tide and winds,
And like effect of their contention finds.

On Love.

Anger, in hasty words or blows,
Itself discharges on our foes;

And sorrow, too, finds some relief
In tears, which wait upon our grief:
So every passion, but fond love,
Unto its own redress does move;
But that alone the wretch inclines
To what prevents his own designs;
Makes him lament, and sigh, and weep,
Disordered, tremble, fawn, and creep;
Postures which render him despised,
Where he endeavours to be prized.
For women (born to be controlled)
Stoop to the forward and the bold;

From the Portrait by John Riley in the National Portrait Gallery.

Affect the haughty and the proud,
The gay, the frolic, and the loud.
Who first the generous steed oppressed,
Not kneeling did salute the beast ;
But with high courage, life, and force,
Approaching, tamed the unruly horse.
Unwisely we the wiser East
Pity, supposing them oppressed
With tyrants' force, whose law is will,
By which they govern, spoil, and kill;
Each nymph, but moderately fair,
Commands with no less rigour here.
Should some brave Turk, that walks among
His twenty lasses, bright and young,
And beckons to the willing dame,
Preferred to quench his present flame,
Behold as many gallants here,
With modest guise and silent fear,
All to one female idol bend,

While her high pride does scarce descend

To mark their follies, he would swear
That these her guard of eunuchs were,

And that a more majestic queen,
Or humbler slaves, he had not seen.
All this with indignation spoke,
In vain I struggled with the yoke

Of mighty Love: that conquering look,
When next beheld, like lightning strook
My blasted soul, and made me bow
Lower thin those I pitied now.

So the tall stag, upon the brink

Of some smooth stream about to drink,
Surveying there his armed head,
With shame remembers that he fled
The scorned dogs, resolves to try
The combat next; but if their cry
Invades again his trembling ear,
He straight resumes his wonted care;
Leaves the untasted spring behind,
And, winged with fear, outflies the wind.

On a Girdle.

That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind :
No monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this hath done.

It was my heaven'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.

On the Marriage of the Dwarfs.
Design or chance makes others wive,
But Nature did this match contrive :
Eve might as well have Adam fled,
As she denied her little bed

To him, for whom Heaven seemed to frame
And measure out this only dame.

Thrice happy is that humble pair,
Beneath the level of all care!
Over whose heads those arrows fly
Of sad distrust and jealousy ;
Secured in as high extreme,

As if the world held none but them.

To him the fairest nymphs do shew Like moving mountains topped with snow; And every man a Polypheme

Does to his Galatea seem.

Ah, Chloris, that kind Nature thus From all the world had severed us; Creating for ourselves us two,

As love has me for only you!

From 'A Panegyric to my Lord Protector.'
While with a strong and yet a gentle hand,
You bridle faction, and our hearts command,
Protect us from ourselves, and from the foe,
Make us unite, and make us conquer too;

Let partial spirits still aloud complain,
Think themselves injured that they cannot reign,
And own no liberty, but where they may
Without control upon their fellows prey.

Above the waves, as Neptune shewed his face,
To chide the winds, and save the Trojan race,
So has your Highness, raised above the rest,
Storms of ambition tossing us repressed.

Your drooping country, torn with civil hate,
Restored by you is made a glorious state ;
The seat of empire, where the Irish come,
And the unwilling Scots, to fetch their doom.

The sea's our own; and now all nations greet,
With bending sails, each vessel of our fleet ;
Your power extends as far as winds can blow,
Or swelling sails upon the globe may go.

Heaven, that hath placed this island to give law,
To balance Europe, and its states to awe,
In this conjunction doth on Britain smile,
The greatest leader, and the greatest isle!
Whether this portion of the world were rent
By the rude ocean from the continent,
Or thus created, it was sure designed
To be the sacred refuge of mankind.

Hither the oppressed shall henceforth resort,
Justice to crave, and succour at your court;
And then your Highness, not for ours alone,
But for the world's Protector shall be known.

.

Still as you rise, the state exalted too,
Finds no distemper while 'tis changed by you;
Changed like the world's great scene! when, without

noise,

The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys.

Had you, some ages past, this race of glory

Run, with amazement we should read your story;
But living virtue, all achievements past,
Meets envy still to grapple with at last.

This Cæsar found; and that ungrateful age,
With losing him, went back to blood and rage;
Mistaken Brutus thought to break their yoke,
But cut the bond of union with that stroke.

That sun once set, a thousand meaner stars
Gave a dim light to violence and wars;
To such a tempest as now threatens all,
Did not your mighty arm prevent the fall.

If Rome's great senate could not wield that sword,
Which of the conquered world had made them lord,
What hope had ours, while yet their power was new,
To rule victorious armies, but by you?

You, that had taught them to subdue their foes,
Could order teach, and their high spirits compose;
To every duty could their minds engage,
Provoke their courage, and command their rage.

So when a lion shakes his dreadful mane,
And angry grows, if he that first took pain
To tame his youth approach the haughty beast,
He bends to him, but frights away the rest.

As the vexed world, to find repose, at last
Itself into Augustus' arms did cast;
So England now does, with like toil opprest,
Her weary head upon your bosom rest.

Then let the Muses, with such notes as these,
Instruct us what belongs unto our peace.
Your battles they hereafter shall indite,
And draw the image of our Mars in fight.

Tell of towns stormed, and armies overrun,
And mighty kingdoms by your conduct won:
How, while you thundered, clouds of dust did choke
Contending troops, and seas lay hid in smoke.

Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse,
And every conqueror creates a Muse!

Here, in low strains, your milder deeds we sing,
But there, my lord, we'll bays and olives bring

To crown your head; while you in triumph ride
O'er conquered nations, and the sea beside :
While all your neighbour Princes unto you,
Like Joseph's sheaves, pay reverence and due.

From 'On a War with Spain.'
When Britain, looking with a just disdain
Upon this gilded majesty of Spain,
And knowing well that empire must decline
Whose chief support and sinews are of coin,
Our nation's solid virtue did oppose

To the rich troublers of the world's repose.

And now some months, encamping on the main, Our naval army had besieged Spain : They that the whole world's monarchy designed, Are to their ports by our bold fleet confined,

From whence our Red Cross they triumphant see,
Riding without a rival on the sea.

Others may use the ocean as their road,
Only the English make it their abode,
Whose ready sails with every wind can fly,
And make a covenant with the inconstant sky:
Our oaks secure, as if they there took root,
We tread on billows with a steady foot.

At Penshurst.

While in this park I sing, the listening deer
Attend my passion, and forget to fear;
When to the beeches I report my flame,
They bow their heads, as if they felt the same.
To gods appealing, when I reach their bowers
With loud complaints, they answer me in showers.
To thee a wild and cruel soul is given,

More deaf than trees, and prouder than the heaven!
Love's foe professed! why dost thou falsely feign
Thyself a Sidney? from which noble strain
He sprung, that could so far exalt the name
Of Love, and warm our nation with his flame,
That all we can of love or high desire,
Seems but the smoke of amorous Sidney's fire.
Nor call her mother who so well does prove
One breast may hold both chastity and love.
Never can she, that so exceeds the spring
In joy and bounty, be supposed to bring
One so destructive. To no human stock
We owe this fierce unkindness, but the rock;
That cloven rock produced thee, by whose side
Nature, to recompense the fatal pride

Of such stern beauty, placed those healing springs
Which not more help, than that destruction, brings.
Thy heart no ruder than the rugged stone,

I might, like Orpheus, with my numerous moan

Melt to compassion; now my traitorous song
With thee conspires to do the singer wrong;
While thus I suffer not myself to lose
The memory of what augments my woes;
But with my own breath still foment the fire,
Which flames as high as fancy can aspire!

This last complaint the indulgent ears did pierce
Of just Apollo, president of verse;

Highly concerned that the Muse should bring
Damage to one whom he had taught to sing :
Thus he advised me: 'On yon aged tree
Hang up thy lute, and hie thee to the sea,
That there with wonders thy diverted mind
Some truce, at least, may with this passion find.'
Ah, cruel nymph! from whom her humble swain
Flies for relief unto the raging main,

And from the winds and tempests does expect

A milder fate than from her cold neglect !
Yet there he'll pray that the unkind may prove
Blest in her choice; and vows this endless love
Springs from no hope of what she can confer,
But from those gifts which Heaven has heaped on her.

The Bud.

Lately on yonder swelling bush,
Big with many a coming rose,
This early bud began to blush,

And did but half itself disclose;

I plucked it though no better grown,
And now you see how full 'tis blown.
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.

If our loose breath so much can do, What may the same in forms of love, Of purest love and music too,

When Flavia it aspires to move? When that which lifeless buds persuades To wax more soft, her youth invades ?

Song-Go, Lovely Rose.

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 spied, That, hadst thou sprung

In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
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 they share

That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

From 'The Last Verses in the Book.'
The seas are quiet when the winds give o'er ;
So calm are we when passions are no more:
For then we know how vain it was to boast
Of fleeting things, so certain to be lost.
Clouds of affection from our younger eyes
Conceal that emptiness which age descries.

The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made :
Stronger by weakness wiser men become,

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.

Editions of Waller are those of Fenton (1729), and Mr G. Thorn Drury in The Muses Library' (1893; who gives the 1686 text of the poems). Mr Gosse in his Cambridge lectures, From Shakespeare to Pope (1885), has been thought to attach too much importance to the influence of Waller. See also Julia Cartwright's Sacharissa (1892), and Mr Beeching's essay on 'Waller's Distich' in An English Miscellany (1901).

Sir William D'Avenant, poet and playwright, was born in February 1606, and was the son of a vintner at Oxford. A scandalous story was told by Pope to Oldys, and to Pope by Betterton the player that he was the natural son of Shakespeare, who was in the habit of putting up at the Crown Tavern on his journeys between London and Stratford. This tradition was evidently encouraged by D'Avenant himself, who was ostentatious in admiring Shakespeare above all other poets, and one of the first essays of whose muse' in boyhood was an Ode to Shakespeare. D'Avenant's career led him through some strange vicissitudes. He was entered at Lincoln College, but left without taking a degree; he then became page to the Duchess of Richmond, and afterwards was in the service of the poet Lord Brooke. About 1628 he began to write for the stage and in 1638, the year after the death of Ben Jonson, he was appointed Laureate. About the same time he lost his nose through an illness—a calamity which exposed him to the merriment of Suckling, Denham, and other wits. He became in 1639 manager of Drury Lane, but entering into the intrigues of the Civil War, fell under the suspicion of Parliament and fled to France. When the queen sent over to the Earl of Newcastle a quantity of military stores, D'Avenant resolved to return to England, and he distinguished himself so much in the cause of the royalists that he was knighted by Charles I. at the siege of Gloucester (September 1643). On the decline of the king's affairs he returned to France, and wrote part of his Gondibert. His next move was to sail for Virginia, sent by the queen in charge of new colonists; but the vessel was captured by one of the Parliamentary ships-of-war, and D'Avenant was lodged in prison at Cowes Castle in the Isle of Wight. In 1650 he was removed to the Tower, in order to be tried by the High Commission Court-a danger from which he was released after two years' imprison

behalf; and as D'Avenant is reported to have interfered in favour of Milton when the royalists were again in the ascendant after the Restoration, one would gladly believe in this graceful reciprocity. When the author of Gondibert obtained his enlargement, he set about establishing a theatre, and, to the surprise of all, succeeded in the attempt (1658), having two years earlier produced in a private house what was practically the first opera in England. By these semi-public performances in a private house, D'Avenant may be said to have revived the stage in England under the Commonwealth, and with the sanction of the authorities. But his earliest dramatic piece, Albovine, King of Lombardy, was written in 1629, and deals with some of the same personages as the poem Gondibert. It is the first of a long series of five-and-twenty plays, some in prose, some in blank verse; while the opera The Siege of Rhodes and some of the masques are in rhyme. Not a few of the plays are fairly readable; they are usually more decorous than those of his contemporaries, but in some the humour is even coarser than the diction, and the author rollicks in tales of lust and horror. The Platonick Lovers is not so coarse as might have been expected in a comedy satirising Lovers of a pure

Celestial kind such as some style Platonical (as one of the characters says in words Byron might have written); though it sufficiently appears that as to Plato, in the author's opinion,

They father on him a fantastic love He never knew, poor gentleman. After the Restoration he again basked in royal favour, and engaged the services of some highly accomplished actors. Killigrew and he had licenses for theatres in 1661, and were both formally empowered to employ women actors for women's parts-heretofore a sporadic occurrence. But Southey, not without some reason, says: 'His last work was his worst: it was an alteration of the Tempest, executed in conjunction with Dryden; and marvellous indeed is it that two men of such great and indubitable genius should have combined to debase and vulgarise and pollute such a poem as the Tempest? D'Avenant, who continued to write and superintend the performance of plays till his death, 7th April 1668, was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The epic poem of Gondibert (1651), which was regarded by D'Avenant's friends and admirers-Cowley and Waller being of the number-as a great and durable monument of genius, has retained a certain interest which the author's dramas have entirely lost. The scene is laid in Lombardy ; but names like Oswald and Hurgonill, Astragon and Paradine, show that no attempt is made to ensure local colour or historic vraisemblance. The critics were from the very first strangely at variance as to its merits, doubtless because the poem, though not without a certain solidity of