Waller. He undoubtedly stands first in the list of refiners, and, for aught I know, last too; for I question whether in Charles II.'s reign English did not come to its full perfection; and whether it has not had its Augustan age as well as the Latin. It seems to be already mixed with foreign languages as far as its purity will bear; and, as chemists say of their menstruums, to be quite sated with the infusion. But posterity will best judge of this. In the meantime, it is a surprising reflection, that between what Spenser wrote last, and Waller first, there should not be much above twenty years' distance; and yet the one's language, like the money of that time, is as current now as ever; whilst the other's words are like old coins, one must go to an antiquary to understand their true meaning and value. Such advances may a great genius make, when it undertakes anything in earnest! Some painters will hit the chief lines and masterstrokes of a face so truly, that through all the differences of age the picture shall still bear a resemblance. This art was Mr. Waller's: he sought out, in this flowing tongue of ours, what parts would last, and be of standing use and ornament; and this he did so successfully, that his language is now as fresh as it was at first setting out. Were we to judge barely by the wording, we could not know what was wrote at twenty, and what at fourscore. He complains, indeed, of a tide of words that comes in upon the English poet, and overflows whatever he builds; but this was less his case than any man's that ever wrote; and the mischief of it is, this very complaint will last long enough to confute itself; for though English be mouldering stone, as he tells us there, yet he has certainly picked the best out of a bad quarry. We are no less beholden to him for the new turn of verse which he brought in, and the improvement he made in our numbers. Before his time men rhymed indeed, and that was all: as for the harmony of measure, and that dance of words which good ears are so much pleased with, they knew nothing of it. Their poetry then was made up almost entirely of monosyllables; which, when they come together in any cluster, are certainly the most harsh, untuneable things in the world. If any man doubts of this, let him read ten lines in Donne, and he will be quickly convinced. Besides, their verses ran all into one another, and hung together, throughout a whole copy, like the hooked atoms that compose a body in Des Cartes. There was no distinction of This statement is not quite accurate. Spenser died in January, 1598-9, and, assuming the date of Waller's first poem to have been 1624, the interval must have been at least twenty-five years. parts, no regular stops, nothing for the ear to rest upon; but as soon as the copy began, down it went like a larum, incessantly; and the reader was sure to be out of breath before he got to the end of it: so that really verse, in those days, was but downright prose tagged with rhymes. Mr. Waller removed all these faults, brought in more polysyllables, and smoother measures, bound up his thoughts better, and in a cadence more agreeable to the nature of the verse he wrote in; so that wherever the natural stops of that were, he contrived the little breakings of his sense so as to fall in with them; and, for that reason, since the stress of our verse lies commonly upon the last syllable, you will hardly ever find him using a word of no force there. I would say, if I were not afraid the reader would think me too nice, that he commonly closes with verbs, in which we know the life of language consists. Among other improvements we may reckon that of his rhymes, which are always good, and very often the better for being new. He had a fine ear, and knew how quickly that sense was cloyed by the same round of chiming words still returning upon it. It is a decided case by the great master of writing,* Quæ sunt ampla, et pulchra, diu placere possunt; quæ lepida et concinna (amongst which rhyme must, whether it will or no, take its place), citò satietate afficiunt aurium sensum fastidiosissimum. This he understood very well; and therefore, to take off the danger of a surfeit that way, strove to please by variety and new sounds. Had he carried this observation, among others, as far as it would go, it must, methinks, have shown him the incurable fault of this jingling kind of poetry, and have led his later judgment to blank verse; but he continued an obstinate lover of rhyme to the very last; it was a mistress that never appeared unhandsome in his eyes, and was courted by him long after Saccharissa was forsaken. He had raised it, and brought it to that perfection, we now enjoy it in; and the poet's temper (which has always a little vanity in it) would not suffer him ever to slight a thing he had taken so much pains to adorn. My Lord Roscommon was more impartial; no man ever rhymed truer and evener than he; yet he is so just as to confess that it is but a trifle, and to wish the tyrant dethroned, and blank verse set up in its room. There is a third person, the living glory of our English poetry, who has disclaimed the use of it upon the stage, though no man ever employed it there so happily as he. It was the strength of his genius that first brought it into credit in plays, and it is the force * Ad Herennium, lib. iv. † Mr. Dryden. of his example that has thrown it out again. In other kinds of writing it continues still, and will do so till some excellent spirit arises that has leisure enough, and resolution, to break the charm, and free us from the troublesome bondage of rhyming, as Mr. Milton very well calls it, and has proved it as well by what he has wrote in another way. But this is a thought for times at some distance; the present age is a little too warlike; it may perhaps furnish out matter for a good poem in the next, but it will hardly encourage one now. Without prophesying, a man may easily know what sort of laurels are like to be in request. Whilst I am talking of verse, I find myself, I do not know how, betrayed into a great deal of prose. I intended no more than to put the reader in mind what respect was due to anything that fell from the pen of Mr. Waller. I have heard his lastprinted copies, which are added in the several editions of his poems, very slightly spoken of, but certainly they do not deserve it. They do indeed discover themselves to be his last, and that is the worst we can say of them. He is there Jam senior; sed cruda Deo viridisque senectus.* The same censure, perhaps, will be passed on the pieces of this Second Part. I shall not so far engage for them, as to pretend they are all equal to whatever he wrote in the vigour of his youth; yet they are so much of a piece with the rest, that any man will at first sight know them to be Mr. Waller's. Some of them were wrote very early, but not put into former collections, for reasons obvious enough, but which are now ceased. The play was altered to please the court; it is not to be doubted who sat for the Two Brothers' characters. It was agreeable to the sweetness of Mr. Waller's temper to soften the rigour of the tragedy, as he expresses it; but whether it be so agreeable to the nature of tragedy itself to make everything come off easily, I leave to the critics. In the prologue and epilogue there are a few verses that he has made use of upon another occasion; but the reader may be pleased to allow that in him that has been allowed so long in Homer and Lucretius. Exact writers dress up their thoughts so very well always, that when they have need of the same sense, they cannot put it into other words but it must be to its prejudice. Care has been taken in this book, to get together everything of Mr. Waller's that is not put into the former collection; so that between both the reader may make the set complete. It will, perhaps, be contended, after all, that some of these * Virg. Æn. vi. v. 304. ought not to have been published; and Mr. Cowley's* decision will be urged, that a neat tomb of marble is a better monument than a great pile of rubbish. It might be answered to this, that the pictures and poems of great masters have been always valued, though the last hand were not put to them: and I believe none of those gentlemen that will make the objection would refuse a sketch of Raphael's, or one of Titian's draughts of the first sitting. I might tell them, too, what care has been taken by the learned to preserve the fragments of the ancient Greek and Latin poets; there has been thought to be a divinity in what they said; and therefore the least pieces of it have been kept up and reverenced like religious relics; and I am sure, take away the mille anni,† and impartial reasoning will tell us there is as much due to the memory of Mr. Waller, as to the most celebrated names of antiquity. But, to waive the dispute now of what ought to have been done, I can assure the reader what would have been, had this edition been delayed. The following poems were got abroad, and in a great many hands; it were vain to expect that, among so many admirers of Mr. Waller, they should not meet with one fond enough to publish them. They might have stayed, indeed, till by frequent transcriptions they had been corrupted extremely, and jumbled together with things of another kind; but then they would have found their way into the world; so it was thought a greater piece of kindness to the author to put them out whilst they continue genuine and unmixed, and such as he himself, were he alive, might own. * In the preface to his works. † Alluding to that verse in Juvenal Et uni cedit Homero -Sat. 7. And yields to Homer on no other score, MR. C. DRYDEN. OF THE DANGER HIS MAJESTY [BEING PRINCE] ESCAPED IN THE ROAD AT ST. ANDERO.* WOW had his Highness bid farewell to Spain, And reached the sphere of his own power, the main; With British bounty in his ship he feasts The Hesperian princes, his amazèd guests, To find that watery wilderness exceed The entertainment of their great Madrid. Healths to both kings, attended with the roar Of cannons, echoed from the affrighted shore, With loud resemblance of his thunder, prove Bacchus the seed of cloud compelling Jove; While to his harp divine Arion sings+ The loves and conquests of our Albion kings. Of the Fourth Edward was his noble song, Fierce, goodly, valiant, beautiful, and young; * The occasion of this piece was an accident that occurred to Prince Charles on his return from Spain, after abandoning his suit for the hand of the Infanta. The prince had been attended from Madrid by the Cardinal Zopala, the Marquis Aytone, and other Spanish noblemen, and, having arrived at the port of St. Andero, in the Bay of Biscay, he gave them a farewell entertainment of great magnificence. 'In carrying them back to shore,' says Mr. Fenton, a tempest overtook them with so much fury that they could neither reach land, nor regain the fleet; and night coming on when the rowers were fainting with toil, their horror was almost increased to despair. In this calamity they yielded themselves to the mercy of the seas, till at last they spied a light in a ship near to which the storm had driven them; on which, not without some danger of being dashed to pieces, they were safely received.' This occurrence took place towards the end of September or beginning of October, 1623. Fenton fixes the date of the poem immediately afterwards, in Waller's eighteenth year; but the allusions to the Princess Henrietta bring it down a little later. The marriage with the Princess was not arranged till the following August, near to which time the piece must have been written, or completed. It is probable, from the evident care and finish bestowed upon the lines, that Waller began the piece early, and lingered long over its composition. This elaboration is the more remarkable in a first production, and indicates at the outset that fastidiousness of taste and execution which mark the whole of his poems. Dr. Johnson objects to this allusion to Arion (whose story is related by Plutarch) that it is puerile and ridiculous. WALLER. |