equivalent, it has been calculated, to an annual
income, now-a-days, of ten thousand pounds
sterling. Obviously all of which, beyond
what was absolutely requisite for the expenses
of his education, must, throughout the period
of his pupilage, have been in due course
accumulating. Increased thus by compound
interest during the lapse of a score of years,
Waller's pecuniary resources were soon
appreciably extended still more, as already
hinted, by his early marriage with Miss
Banks, a rich city heiress. In the suit for
whose heart (and purse) it should be recorded
that he signally triumphed over one Mr.
Crofts—a rival so far formidable, that he was
reputed to be backed by very powerful court
influence.

Glorified by these doubled riches—
vivacious, vain, and convivial—with an oratorical
repute rising rapidly within, and a literary
repute rising no less rapidly without, the walls
of parliament, Waller (bereaved of his fine city
madame thus prematurely) ventured, at
twenty-five, to fix his audacious gaze upon
the haughty and patrician Sacharissa.
Ambitious and affluent himself, he probably
recognised no disparity whatever between their
relative positions: the status respectively—
here of an earl's daughter—there of a
commoner, well born, well-bred, rich, comely,
aspiring, and, in many ways, rarely
accomplished. Such was the vain glory of the man
who spoke in the House of Commons with
the self-possession of a practised debater at
the age of eighteen; and who, while yet a
stripling, took within his grasp the poetic
lyre then in vogue, and struck its chords
boldly from the first with the skill of
a practised and almost-perfected musician.
It can scarcely be wondered that, successful
thus in various ways at the very outset, his
confidence in his own capacities should
speedily have become, in a manner, supreme
and consummate. Educated successively at
Eton and at King's College, Cambridge, he
took his place at the early period already
intimated, among the national legislators at
Westminster, as M.P. for his father's birth-
place, the little Buckinghamshire borough of
Agmondesham. At sixteen (observe! two
years earlier), he had already found his way
to Whitehall, among the gadflies of the court
of King James the First—overhearing, there,
upon one occasion, at the royal dinner-table,
a contest of wits, since then recorded upon
the pages of history as in many respects
curiously, even portentously, characteristic.
The air of the court infected him: it
influenced successively his muse, his heart, and
his ambition. His first poetic effort was in
loyal celebration of the escape of the Prince
(afterwards King Charles the First) at St.
Andero. His second was in commemoration
of his Majesty's wonderful equanimity on
receiving intelligence, on the twenty-third of
August, sixteen hundred and twenty-eight,
of the assassination of the royal favourite,
the handsome and profligate Duke of
Buckingham. It is amusing to note in the former
piece, that earliest of Waller's literary
performances, how fragrantly the soil of the
fancied Parnassus breathes, so to speak, of
the freshly-dinted turf of the playground!
Witness this, the schoolboy metaphor (verses
forty-five to forty-six) comparing the gilded
barge in which the Prince of Wales was
nearly foundering among the Spanish waters,
off Saint Andero, to the perilous tossing to
and fro of the leather-covered and elastic
bladder in the game of football. Witness
this, moreover, hardly less, the whole of the
egregiously academic illustrations, referring
now to the painter Timanthes, now to the
floral death of Cyparissus, and so forth,
throughout the scholastic souvenirs of some
well-thumbed page of Ovid or Thucydides—
scattered abundantly among the scanty verses
relating to the bloody deed of Lieutenant
Felton, by whose red right hand George
Villiers was basely done to death at
Portsmouth. But if the style spoke of the schools,
the themes thus celebrated spoke also in
their turn of the court no less distinctly.
Waller had become a courtier and a poet not
only prematurely but simultaneously. And
precisely as the mere contagion of the golden
ringing of the broad pieces in the ample
purse caused him apparently to grasp, in the
first instance, at the money-bags of the City
Heiress avariciously, so, likewise, in the
second and more notable venture of his
affections, the impulse seemed to be imparted
from without to this creation, half of hot
impetuosity, half of cool deliberation. It
should be remembered of him, that he was
born with a ponderous gold spoon in his
mouth, rather than with the mere matter-of-
fact silver one, lightly attenuated, and plainly
fiddle-patterned. His fortune was ready
made, and waiting for him. So might it be
said of his style, whether in regard to rhetoric,
or in regard to versification. " What
was acquired by Denham," said the great
Doctor, " was inherited by Waller." It
appeared as though to have he had but to ask.
Wherefore, as he had previously wooed and
won Miss Banks, and that too against
considerable odds, so now again he dared to woo,
and hoped to win, the lofty and far more
desirable Sacharissa. Likely enough, he
plumed himself still more upon his lineage
than upon either his parts or his possessions;
for with this poet, at least, it was no russet
bird of song warbling under the eaves of a
garret. It was here, rather that scarcely
conceivable phenomenon, the vanity and
splendour of the peacock, enhanced by the
glorious voice and thrilling cadence of the
nightingale.

Through the maternal line, he claimed
kindred with the Great English People, as
represented in the Anglo-Saxon yeomanry;
and this, moreover, by the strongest thews
and sinews of relationship: his mother being