These literary parallels are often childish enough. The courage of Prince Charles, in peril at St. Andero, is contrasted with the comparative cowardice of Æneas in a like storm:

Great Maro could no greater tempest feign,
When the loud winds, usurping on the main,
For angry Juno, laboured to destroy
The hated relics of confounded Troy;
His bold Æneas on like billows tossed

In a tall ship, and all his country lost,

Dissolves with fear; and, both his hands upheld,
Proclaims them happy whom the Greeks had quelled
In honourable fight; our hero, set

In a small shallop, Fortune in his debt,

So near a hope of crowns and sceptres, more
Than ever Priam, when he flourished, wore.

His Majesty, "receiving the news of the Duke of Buck-
ingham's death," appears with equal advantage compared
with Achilles, when informed of the death of Patroclus:-
Bold Homer durst not so great virtue feign
In his best pattern: of Patroclus slain,
With such amazement as weak mothers use,
And frantic gesture, he receives the news.
Yet fell his darling by th' impartial chance
Of war, imposed by royal Hector's lance;
Thine in full peace, and by a vulgar hand,

Torn from thy bosom, left his high command.

Mary de Medicis, taking refuge in England in 1638, reminds the poet both of Latona and Cybele :

Great Queen of Europe! where thy offspring wears
All the chief crowns; where princes are thy heirs ;
As welcome thou to sea-girt Britain's shore,

As erst Latona (who fair Cynthia bore)

To Delos was; here shines a nymph as bright,
By thee disclosed, with like increase of light.

Glad Berecynthia so

Among her deathless progeny did go;

A wreath of towers adorned her reverend head,
Mother of all that on ambrosia fed.

Thy godlike race must sway the age to come,
As she Olympus peopled with her womb.

In the hyperboles of Waller's love-poems the same elaborate classicism appears. If Sacharissa seats herself on a bank, the trees and plants bow their heads to her as they did to Orpheus and Amphion: her hand is the occasion for strife to the gallants of the age as Achilles' shield was to the Greeks: when she wishes to sleep,

With our plaints offended and our tears
Wise Somnus to that paradise repairs ;
Waits on her will and wretches does forsake,

To court the nymph for whom the wretches wake.

And in some exceedingly ingenious lines he applies to himself (Thyrsis), in his rejected suit to Sacharissa, the story of Phoebus and Daphne :

Yet what he sung in his immortal strain,
Though unsuccessful, was not sung in vain ;
All but the nymph that should redress his wrong
Attend his passion, and approve his song.
Like Phoebus thus, acquiring unsought praise,

He catched at love, and filled his arms with bays.

The exaggeration of what is essentially little must always have an air of ridicule; yet Waller showed that he could rise into simple dignity when he found a worthy subject, as in the noble opening couplet To the King, On his Navy:

or

Where'er thy navy spreads her canvas wings,
Homage to thee, and peace to all, she brings;

as when, casting aside mythology, he compares Cromwell with Cæsar :

Still as you rise the state, exalted too,

Finds no distemper while 'tis changed by you;

Change, 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 oppressed,
Her weary head upon your bosom rest.

Waller's misfortune, as a poet, was that he had not sufficient greatness of mind to look for subjects of the height to which his genius was capable of mounting: he was content to please little minds with compliments adapted to their stature. Thus, in some lines on English Verse, having declared most falsely of Chaucer that all his verse was written with a view to winning women's love, he adds:

This was the generous poet's scope;
And all an English pen can hope,
To make the fair approve his flame,
That can so far extend their fame.

Verse, thus designed, has no ill fate,
If it arrive but at the date

Of fading beauty; if it prove
But as long-lived as present love.

For these small ends he worked with as much labour as Carew, and often with as little result. The Duke of Buckingham says that he gave the greater part of a summer to the composition of the following commonplace lines, which he wrote in a copy of Tasso's poems belonging to the second Duchess of York:

Tasso knew how the fairer sex to grace,
But in no one durst all perfection place.
In her alone that owns this book is seen
Clorinda's spirit and her lofty mien,
Sophronia's piety, Erminia's truth,
Armida's charms, her beauty and her youth.

Our princess here, as in a glass does dress
Her well-taught mind, and every grace express.
More to our wonder than Rinaldo fought,
The hero's race excels the poet's thought.

When, however, he was in the vein, he could finish his compositions with all Herrick's tact and skill, as may be seen in the exquisite song beginning "Go, lovely Rose!" and his contemporaries were rightly impressed with his "smoothness," of which perhaps the best example is the opening of his poem 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!

In his closing years he turned his thoughts steadily to religion, and Johnson says with justice that in his poem on Divine Love, written at the age of eighty-two, there is no failure of his peculiar gift of harmony. His speeches in Parliament show that he wanted neither the reading nor the reasoning power required to make him succeed as a didactic poet, and in many of his couplets, such as the following:-

Poets lose the half praise they should have got
Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

For He took flesh that, where His precepts fail,
His practice as a pattern may prevail.

His love, at once, and dread, instruct our thought;
As man He suffered, and as God He taught:

Laws would be useless which rude nature awe;

Love, changing Nature, would prevent the law

he anticipates the terseness and energy of Dryden. But, as a whole, in view of the lowness of his aims, he must be content with the praise usually awarded to him, of being the chief pioneer in harmonising the familiar use of the heroic couplet, and must yield the palm for didactic writing in that measure to another poet whose name is often associated with his own.

Sir John Denham, son of Sir John Denham, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench in Ireland, was born in Dublin in 1615, and was educated first in London and afterwards at Trinity College, Oxford, where he matriculated 18th November 1631. He does not appear to have taken a degree. After leaving Oxford he studied law at Lincoln's Inn, and married, when he was only nineteen, Ann Cotton, by whom he had three children. After his marriage he lived with his father at Egham, where, in 1636, he wrote his paraphrase of the second book of the Æneid. Coming into the possession of the estate on the death of his father in 1638, he much impaired his property by gambling. At the outbreak of the Civil War he was High Sheriff of Surrey, and was made by the King Governor of Farnham Castle, where being taken prisoner by Sir William Waller, he was sent to London, but was allowed to join the King at Oxford in 1643. Here he published Cooper's Hill, which had been written three years before. His goods were sold by the Parliament in 1644. From that time till the King's death Denham was in close attendance on Charles, and after his execution he joined Henrietta Maria. His landed estates were sold by the Parliament in 1651; while, as he had shown activity in the Royalist cause on returning to England, he himself was ordered in 1655 to be confined