gayer and more animated expression is here, upon the whole, the more natural. The quantity of explosive matter of all kinds which Butler has contrived to pack up in his verses is amazing, it is crack upon crack, flash upon flash, from the first line of his long poem to the last. Much of this incessant bedazzlement is, of course, merely verbal, or otherwise of the humblest species of wit; but an infinite number of the happiest things are also thrown out. And Hudibras is far from being all mere broad farce. Butler's power of arguing in verse, in his own way, may almost be put on a par with Dryden's in his; and, perseveringly as he devotes himself upon system to the exhibition of the ludicrous and grotesque, he sometimes surprises us with a sudden gleam of the truest beauty of thought and expression breaking out from the midst of the usual rattling fire of smartnesses and conundrums— as when in one place he exclaims of a thin cloud drawn over the moon Mysterious veil; of brightness made, At once her lustre and her shade! He must also be allowed to tell his story and to draw his characters well, independently of his criticisms. WALLER. The most celebrated among the minor poets of the period between the Restoration and the Revolution was Waller. Edmund Waller, born in 1605, had, as already noticed, announced himself as a writer of verse before the close of the reign of James I., by his lines on the escape of Prince Charles at the port of San Andero, in the Bay of Biscay, on his return from Spain, in September, 1623; and he continued to write till after the accession of James II., in whose reign he died, in the year 1687. His last production was the little poem concluding with one of his happiest, one of his most characteristic, and one of his bestknown passages :— The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made : 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. Fenton, his editor, tells us that a number of poems on religious subjects, to which these verses refer, were mostly written when he was about [above] eighty years old; and he has himself intimated that his bodily faculties were now almost When we for age could neither read nor write, The subject made us able to indite. gone: Waller, therefore, as well as Milton, Cowley, and Butler, may be considered to have formed his manner in the last age; but his poetry does not belong to the old English school even so much as that of either Butler or Cowley. The contemporaries of the earlier portion of his long career were Carew and Lovelace; and with them he is properly to be classed in respect of poetical style and manner. Both Lovelace and Carew, however, as has been already intimated, have more passion than Waller, who, with all his taste and elegance, was incapable of either expressing or feeling anything very lofty or generous-being, in truth, poet as he was, a very mean-souled description of person, as his despicable political course sufficiently evinced. His poetry accordingly is beyond the reach of critical animadversion on the score of such extravagance as is sometimes prompted by strong emotion. Waller is always perfectly master of himself, and idolizes his mistress with quite as much coolness and self-possession as he flatters his prince. But, although cold and unaffecting at all times, he occasionally rises to much dignity of thought and manner. His panegyric on Cromwell, the offering of his gratitude to the Protector for the permission granted to him of returning to England after ten years' exile, is one of the most graceful pieces of adulation ever offered by poetry to power; and the poet is here probably more sincere than in most of his *The story of what was called Waller's plot, which exploded in May, 1643, is well known. Some of those concerned were executed, and others were punished by long imprisonments; but Waller, who appears to have been the most guilty, is understood to have made his peace by the reckless frankness of his confessions, and was let off with a fine and a licence "to go travel abroad." He left the country accordingly, "and, travelling into France," says Kennet, "improved himself in good letters; and for the rest of his life, which was very long, he chose rather to be admired for a poet than to be envied for a politician." They print among his works some of his speeches in parliament-among the rest his address on Tuesday, July 4th, 1643, when he “was brought to the bar, and had leave given him by the Speaker to say what he could for himself before they proceeded to expel him the House," which is throughout one of the most abject prostrations ever made by anything in the shape of a man. effusions, for the occasion was one on which he was likely to be moved to more than usual earnestness of feeling. A few years after he welcomed Charles II. on his restoration to the throne of his ancestors in another poem, which has been generally considered a much less spirited composition: Fenton accounts for the falling off by the author's advance in the meanwhile from his forty-ninth to his fifty-fifth year-" from which time," he observes, "his genius began to decline apace from its meridian;" but the poet himself assigned another reason:-when Charles frankly told him that he thought his own panegyric much inferior to Cromwell's, "Sir," replied Waller, "we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction." Perhaps the true reason, after all, might be that his majesty's return to England was not quite so exciting a subject to Mr. Waller's muse as his own return had been. One thing must be admitted in regard to Waller's poetry; it is free from all mere verbiage and empty sound; if he rarely or never strikes a very powerful note, there is at least always something for the fancy or the understanding, as well as for the ear, in what he writes. He abounds also in ingenious thoughts, which he dresses to the best advantage, and exhibits with great transparency of style. Eminent, however, as he is in his class, he must be reckoned among that subordinate class of poets who think and express themselves chiefly in similitudes, not among those who conceive and write passionately and metaphorically. He had a decorative and illuminating, but not a transforming imagination. MARVEL. The chief writer of verse on the popular side after the Restoration was Andrew Marvel, the noble-minded member for Hull, the friend of Milton, and, in that age of brilliant profligacy, renowned alike as the first of patriots and of wits. Marvel, the son of the Rev. Andrew Marvel, master of the grammar-school of Hull, was born there in 1620, and died in 1678. His poetical genius has scarcely had justice done to it. He is the author of a number of satires in verse, in which a rich vein of vigorous, though often coarse, humour runs through a careless, extemporaneous style, and which did prodigious execution in the party warfare of the day; but some of his other poetry, mostly perhaps written in the earlier part of his life, is eminent both for the delicate bloom of the sentiment and for grace of form. His Song of the Exiles, beginning "Where the remote Bermudas ride," is a gem of melody, picturesqueness, and sentiment, nearly without a flaw, and is familiar to every lover of poetry. Not of such purity of execution throughout are the lines entitled To his Coy Mistress, but still there are few short poems in the language so remarkable for the union of grace and force, and the easy and flowing transition from a light and playful tone to solemnity, passion, and grandeur. How elegant, and even deferential, is the gay extravagance of the commencement: Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way But thirty thousand to the rest: An age at least to every part; And the last age should show your heart. Nor would I love at lower rate. And then how skilfully managed is the rise from this badinage of courtesy and compliment to the strain almost of the ode or the hymn! and how harmonious, notwithstanding its suddenness, is the contrast between the sparkling levity of the prelude and the solemn pathos that follows!— Till, at the end, the pent-up accumulation of passion bursts its floodgates in the noble lines: Let us roll all our strength, and all Our sweetness, up into one ball; And tear our pleasures with rough strife Thorough the iron gates of life. The following verses, which are less known, are exquisitely elegant and tuneful. They are entitled The Picture of T. C. in a Prospect of Flowers : See with what simplicity This nymph begins her golden days! And there with her fair aspect tames The wilder flowers, and gives them names; But only with the roses plays, And them does tell What colour best becomes them, and what smell. Who can foretell for what high cause This darling of the gods was born? Appease this virtuous enemy of man! O then let me in time compound, Where I may see the glory from some shade. Meantime, whilst every verdant thing Reform the errors of the spring: Make that the tulips may have share Of sweetness, seeing they are fair; And roses of their thorns disarm : But most procure That violets may a longer age endure. But oh, young beauty of the woods, Whom nature courts with fruits and flowers, 1 Charm itself, that is, delight itself. |