BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Edmund Waller, whose poetry is noticeable because he was the first English versifier to adopt the French fashion of writing in couplets, was born in Warwickshire in 1605. He was elected to Parliament at the age of seventeen, and was a member of that body during the greater part of his life. At the beginning of the difficulties between the king and the Parliament, he gained some notoriety by his opposition to the former, but when the Civil War broke out he attached himself to the Royalist cause. In 1643, being convicted of complicity in a plot against Parliament, he was fined £10,000 and imprisoned for twelve months. After his release he went to France; but in 1653 he returned to England and became reconciled to the new government, writing, soon afterward, "A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, of the present Greatness and joint Interest of his Highness and this Nation." At the Restoration he eagerly declared allegiance to Charles II., and wrote a congratulatory ode on that monarch's return. He became a court favorite, noted for his wit, was made provost of Eton, and returned to his old place in Parliament. He died October 21, 1687. The first edition of his poems was published in 1645, and from that time to the close of the seventeenth century he was quite generally regarded as the greatest of English poets. At the present time there are few writers so little considered as he.

Waller may be regarded as the founder of the classical school of English poetry, in which Dryden and Pope excelled, and which remained in the ascendency for more than a century after his death. "The excellence and dignity of rhyme," says Dryden, "were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art, first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly, in distichs, which in the verse of those before him runs on for so many lines together, that the reader is out of breath to overtake it."

And Dr. Johnson says: "He certainly very much excelled in smoothness most of the writers who were living when his poetry commenced. But he was rather smooth than strong: of the 'full resounding line' which Pope attributes to Dryden, he has given very few examples. The general character of his poetry is elegance and gaiety. He seems neither to have had a mind much elevated by nature, nor amplified by learning. His thoughts are such as a liberal conversation and large acquaintance with life would easily supply."