at Drury-lane, in 1749, hissed off the stage for immorality and obscenity.

Want of morals, or of decency, did not in those days. exclude any man from the company of the wealthy and the gay, if he brought with him any powers of entertainment; and Otway is said to have been at this time a favourite companion of the dissolute wits. But as he who desires no virtue in his companion has no virtue in himself, those whom Otway frequented had no purpose of doing more for him than to pay his reckoning. They desired only to drink and laugh: their fondness was without benevolence, and their familiarity without friendship. Men of wit, says one of Otway's biographers, received at that time no favour from the great, but to share their riots; from which they were dismissed again to their own narrow circumstances. Thus they languished in poverty, without the support of eminence.'

Some exception, however, must be made. The Earl of Plymouth, one of King Charles's natural sons, procured for him a cornet's commission in some troops then sent into Flanders. But Otway did not prosper in his military character: for he soon left his commission behind him. whatever was the reason, and came back to London in extreme indigence; which Rochester mentions with merciless insolence in the Session of the Poets:'

Tom Otway came next, Tom Shadwell's dear zany,
And swears for heroics he writes best of any;

Don Carlos his pockets so amply had fill'd,

That his mange was quite cur'd, and his lice were all kill'd.
But Apollo had seen his face on the stage,

And prudently did not think fit to engage

The scum of the play-house, for the prop of an age.

Don Carlos,' from which he is represented as having received so much benefit, was played in 1675. It appears, by the lampoon, to have had great success, and is said to have been played thirty nights together. This, however, it is reasonable to doubt; as so long a continuance of one play upon the stage is a very wide deviation from the practice of that time; when the ardour for theatrical en

This doubt is indeed very reasonable. I know not where it is said that Don Carlos' was acted thirty nights together. Wherever it is said, it is untrue. Downes, who is perfectly good authority on this point, informs us that it was performed ten days successively.-Malone.

tertainments was not yet diffused through the whole people, and the audience, consisting of nearly the same persons, could be drawn together only by variety.

The Orphan' was exhibited in 1680. This is one of the few plays that keep possession of the stage, and has pleased for almost a century, through all the vicissitudes of dramatic fashion. Of this play nothing new can easily be said. It is a domestic tragedy drawn from middle life. Its whole power is upon the affections; for it is not written with much comprehension of thought, or elegance of expression. But if the heart is interested, many other beauties may be wanting, yet not be missed.

The same year produced The History and Fall of Caius Marius ;' much of which is borrowed from the 'Romeo and Juliet' of Shakspeare.

In 1683* was published the first, and next year, the second, parts of 'The Soldier's Fortune,' two comedies now forgotten; and in 1685† his last and greatest dramatic work, "Venice Preserved,' a tragedy, which still continues to be one of the favourites of the public, notwithstanding the want of morality in the original design, and the despicable scenes of vile comedy with which he has diversified his tragic action. By comparing this with his 'Orphan,' it will appear that his images were by time become stronger, and his language more energetic. The striking passages are in every mouth; and the public seems to judge rightly of the faults and excellences of his play, that it is the work of a man not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by consulting nature in his own breast.

Together with those plays he wrote the poems which are in the present collection, and translated from the French the History of the Triumvirate.'

All this was performed before he was thirty-four years old; for he died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his necessities to contract debts, and hunted, as is supposed, by the terriers of the law, he retired to a public-house on Tower hill, where he is said to have died of want; or, as it is re1681. § The despicable scenes of vile comedy' can be no bar to its being a favourite of the public, as they are always omitted in the representation.-J. B.

+ 1684.

1682.

lated by one of his biographers, by swallowing, after a long fast, a piece of bread which charity had supplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and, finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee-house, asked him for a shilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choked with the first mouthful. All this, I hope, is not true; and there is this ground of better hope, that Pope, who lived near enough to be well informed, relates in Spence's Memorials,' that He died of a fever caught by violent pursuit of a thief that had robbed one of his friends. But that indigence, and its concomitants, sorrow and despondency, pressed hard upon him, has never been denied, whatever immediate cause might bring him to the grave.

Of the poems which the present collection admits, the longest is the 'Poet's Complaint of his Muse,' part of which I do not understand; and in that which is less obscure I find little to commend. The language is often gross, and the numbers are harsh. Otway had not much cultivated versification, nor much replenished his mind with general knowledge. His principal power was in moving the passions, to which Dryden in his latter years left an illustrious testimony. He appears by some of his verses to have been a zealous loyalist, and had what was in those times the common reward of loyalty; he lived and died neglected.

WALLER.

EDMUND WALLER was born on the third of March, 1605, at Colshill, in Hertfordshire. His father was Robert Waller, Esq. of Agmondesham, in Buckinghamshire, whose family was originally a branch of the Kentish Wallers; and his mother was the daughter of John Hampden, of Hampden in the same county, and sister to Hampden, the zealot of rebellion.

His father died while he was yet an infant, but left him a yearly income of three thousand five hundred pounds; which, rating together the value of money and the customs of life, we may reckon more than equivalent to ten thousand at the present time.

He was educated by the care of his mother, at Eton; and * In his preface to Fresnoy's Art of Painting.'-Dr. J.

removed afterward to King's College, in Cambridge. He was sent to parliament in his eighteenth, if not in his sixteenth, year, and frequented the court of James the First, where be heard a very remarkable conversation, which the writer of the Life prefixed to his Works, who seems to have been well informed of facts, though he may sometimes err in chronology, has delivered as indubitably certain :

'He found Dr. Andrews, bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Neale, bishop of Durham, standing behind his Majesty's chair; and there happened something extraordinary,' continues this writer, in the conversation those prelates had with the King, on which Mr. Waller did often reflect. His Majesty asked the bishops, " My Lords, cannot I take my subjects' money when I want it, without all this formality of parliament?" The Bishop of Durham readily answered, "God forbid, Sir, but you should: you are the breath of our nostrils." Whereupon the King turned, and said to the Bishop of Winchester, "Well, my Lord, what say you?"

"Sir," replied the Bishop, "I have no skill to judge of parliamentary cases." The King answered, "No put-offs, my Lord; answer me presently."" Then, Sir," said he, "I think it is lawful for you to take my brother Neale's money; for he offers it." Mr. Waller said, the company was pleased with this answer, and the wit of it seemed to affect the King; for, a certain lord coming in soon after, his Majesty cried out, "Oh, my Lord, they say you lig with my lady."-"No, Sir," says his Lordship in confusion; "but I like her company, because she has so much wit." "Why then," says the King, "do you not lig with my Lord of Winchester there?"

Waller's political and poetical life began nearly together. In his eighteenth year he wrote the poem that appears first in his works, on the 'Prince's Escape at St. Andero :' a piece which justifies the observation made by one of his editors, that he attained, by a felicity like instinct, a style which, perhaps, will never be obsolet and that, were we to judge only by the wording, we could not know what was wrote at twenty, and what at fourscore. His versification was, in his first essay, such as it appears in his last performance. By the perusal of Fairfax's translation of 'Tasso, to which, as Dryden relates, he confessed himself Fables.'-Dr. J.

Preface to his

indebted for the smoothness of his numbers, and by his own nicety of observation, he had already formed such a system of metrical harmony as he never afterward much needed, or much endeavoured to improve. Denham corrected his numbers by experience, and gained ground gradually upon the ruggedness of his age; but what was acquired by Denham was inherited by Waller.

The next poem, of which the subject seems to fix the time', is supposed by Mr. Fenton to be the Address to the Queen, which he considers as congratulating her arrival, in Waller's twentieth year. He is apparently mistaken; for the mention of the nation's obligations to her frequent pregnancy, proves that it was written when she had brought many children. We have therefore no date of any other poetical production before that which the murder of the Duke of Buckingham occasioned: the steadiness with which the King received the news in the chapel deserved indeed to be rescued from oblivion.

Neither of these pieces that seem to carry their own dates could have been the sudden effusion of fancy. In the verses on the Prince's escape, the prediction of his marriage with the Princess of France must have been written after the event; in the other, the promises of the King's kindness to the descendants of Buckingham, which could not be properly praised till it had appeared by its effects, shew that time was taken for revision and improvement. It is not known that they were published till they appeared long afterward with other poems.

Waller was not one of those idolaters of praise who cultivate their minds at the expense of their fortunes. Rich as he was by inheritance, he took care early to grow richer, by marrying Mrs. Banks, a great heiress in the city, whom the interest of the court was employed to obtain for Mr. Crofts. Having brought him a son, who died young, and a daughter, who was afterward married to Mr. Dormer, of Oxfordshire, she died in childbed, and left him a widower of about five-and-twenty, gay and wealthy, to please himself with another marriage.

Being too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think himself resistible, he fixed his heart, perhaps half fondly and half ambitiously, upon the Lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, whom he