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JOURNAL

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UF POLITICS, LITERATURE AND

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EDWARD WHELAN}

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CHARLOTTETOWN, PRIN

CE EDWARD ISGAND, MONDAY, NOVEMBE

R 2, 1857. | No. 17

[EDITOR axp PUBLISHER.

Literature. |

THE SWEETEST OF WOMEN:

Theat accomplished gentleman end elegant poet, Mr. Edmund Waller, of Beaconsfield,—Member of Parliament for the. borough of Agmondesham, courtier, wit and orator, man of. fashion—loved and sang, upwards of two centuries ago, the | charms of Sacharissa.

Hereupon the majority may probably inquire, Who was she ? | Who was she, this beautiful and charming Sacharissa ? She | whose name has thus, by the honeyed words of her lover, been | sweetened for ever in the world’s remembrance—literally preserved in the sugary compliments of verse—candied wha} poetry lke a very sweetmeat in the bouquet of our national | literature. For, at once, be it remarked, in regard to this | fantastic and delicious name of Sacharissa, that Dr. Johnson has | observed in reference to it, speaking of it with characteristic | reprehension, and in no less characteristic phraseology, “ The | name is derived from the Latin appellation of sugar, and implies, if it means anything, aspiritiess mildness and dull good-nature.” | Whereas Mr. Elijah Fenton has described it, however, much | more ingeniousiy and judiciously, as a name recalling to mind | {to his antiquarian mind, that is to say!) ** what is related of the ‘Furks’’ (he does not inform us where ') ** who in their gal-| lantries,’’ quoth he quaintly, “ think Sucar Birpara, i. e. bit of | sugar, to be the most polite and endearing compliment they can | use to the ladies."’ Delightful Mr. Fenton—it is the very best key to the enigma—the solution (of course, figuratively) of the delicate love-puzzle of this melting saccharine ‘ appellation ”’ of Sacharissa. Bit of sugar—Sucar Birpara—let us nibble at | it. It gives one the whole fiavour of the poetic flattery con- veyed in those rhythmic words of him whom Mr. Addison has appropriately designated the ** Courtly Waller ’’—words rained down by. him at the feet of his mistress, not, as in the instance of the Arabian princess of the fairy tale, like a shower of pearls and precious stones, but rather in this instance, like a sprinkling of comfits and sugar-pluins. :

Almost all thst the world-at-large really appears to know about Sacharissa, might, we conjecture, be summed up thus succinctly : that she was, when her lover sang of her, very young, very charming, very beautiful. Scareely anything besides ; and that assuredly, as far as it goes, might safely enough have been taken for granted without requiring one syllable im the way of verification, Not but what these Loves of the Poets have occasiona!ly been very startling personages indeed, by reason sometimes even of the absolute incongruity | of their appearance. Apgalling justifications of the bandage significantly bound over the eyes of Eros in the antique mythology! Abominable pendants, in their way, to the classic legend of Beauty wedded to the god of the splintered thigh and the splaw-foot! However it may have been thus, with rare exceptions, these Loves of the Poets, have, nevertheless—almost invariably—appeared, upon investigation, to be what we have but just now very briefly described Sacharissa. Yet, invariably, they have been better than merely visibly beautiful : they have been beautiful, all of them, ideally ; some of them mentally ; a few of them, in a very high degree, spiritually. ‘l'ypes of excellence, existing now and then exclusively, it is true, in the singer’s imsgination ; but, at any rate, existing there, and, consequently, as such, admitting, if merely as the creations of genius, of these elevated poetic celebrations. “A Thing of Beauty ” each has provoked to be in some particular, several in many particulars: as all know since the golden truth was first articulated, in eighteen hundred and e'ghteen, by one John Keats, son of a livery-stable keeper, dowa in Moorfields—a truth but very recently emblazoned, with appositeness, over the grand entrance of the Manchester Fine Arts Exhibition—

A thing of beanty is a joy for ever!

So, no less than with her lovely compeers, has it proved with Sacharissa. Her graces, thanks to Waller, have become perennial. Her charms—reflected in his pellucid verse as in a mirror—have been perpetuated. She has surpassed Diana of Poictiers without an effort: retaining her beauty unimpaired, the sparkle of her glance, and the bloom of her complexion : not only through the wrinkling and withering ordeal of old age, bat—after death—beyond the grave—when her dust itself has long since mouldered away and perished out into absolute nothingness,

At the period when Edmund Waller first ventured to raise his voice in the impassioned language of a suitor aspiring to the hand of Sacharissa, he was still very young, although a widower. Moreover, he was in his worldly fortunes affluent ; having enhanced rather considerably by the addition to it of his first wife's property his own ample and even splendid patrimony. Beyond this, he was vain enough to imagine himself to be little Jess than irresistible, and gifted enough to account, in some measure, for this not absolutely nnparalieled hallucination. It was scarcely seven years from the date of the premature demise of Edmund Spenser, when, upon the third of March, sixteen hundred and five, Edmund Weller first drew breath at Cobshill, in Hertfordshire. Iis father, Robert Waller, of Agmondesham, an the county of Buckingham, dying during the future poet’s infancy, bequeathed to him somewhere about three thousand a pe a-year, an amount then equivalent, it has been calcu- dated, to an annual income, now-a-days, of ten thousand pounds aterling. Obvicusly, all of which, beyond what was absolute! y Fequisite for the expenses of his education, must, throughout the period of his pupilage, have been in due course accumulating. dncreased 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 con- vivial—with an oratorical repute rising rapidly within, and a iterary repute rising no less rapidly without, the walls of Prrliament, Waller (bereaved of his fine city madame thus prematurely) ventured at twenty-five to fix his audacious gaze

favourite, the handsome and profligate Duke of Buckingham. {t is amusing to note in the former piece, that earliest of Wal- ler’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 schoo!boy 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 foot-ball, Witness this, moreover, hardly less, the whole of the egregiously

academic iliustrations, referring now to the painter Timanthes, | now to the floral death of Cyparissus, and so forth, throughout |

the scholastic souvenirs of some wel|-humbed 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 wae basely done to death at Portsmouth. But if the style spoken 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 apparantly to grasp, in the first instance, at the money-bags of the City Heiress avariciously, so, likewise, inthe 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 bis 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 previous!y 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 caves 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, be 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 sister to John Hampden, the Hero of Patriotism, martyred in the green meadow near Chalgrove, and consequently cousin of his Highness the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, the uncrowned king of the Common- wealth.

Through the paternal line, on the contrary, our love-sick aspirant to the blending by marriage of his own “ divine ichor ”’ with the “.blue biood ’’ of the Percies and the Sydney, traced back his ancestry by direct descent up to the Golden Age of Chivalry—in simple truth, to that valiant Sheriff of Kent, Richard Waller of Spendhurst, who, in fourteen hundred and fifteen, with his own hand, took the Duke of Orleans prisoner upon the memorable twenty-fifth of October, when King Henry gave the battle-signal, “ Banuers Advance, ’? upon the famous field of Agincourt. Wherefore probably, the knightly sheriff's descendant deemed it in no way incougruous that he also, in due course, should in the list of love dream of capturing an earl’s daughter, even though that earl’s daughter wore a mail of proof as impenetrable to the shafis of his passion, even, be it said, as the pride of Sacharissa. A suspicion of that repellant pride, Waller seems, in spite of his own matchless self-reliance, to have entertained actually at the very outset; so that we absolutely find him muttering to himself sour grapes’’ witha qualm like thet of an agonising presentiment, in the earliest utterance of his newly-awakened admiration. {tis where he hints (in the Verses upon the Picture of his Beloved) at the fate of the emotions inspired by her graces. “ As doubtful,’ he sighs,

As when, beyond our greedy reach, we see Inviting fruit on too sublime a tree.

Never does he sing to her as he sang to Chloris afterwards :

So the fair tree which still preserves Her frajt and state when no wind blows, In storms from that uprightness swerves And the glad earth about her strews With treasure from her yielding boughs.

Unconsciously, indeed, he confirms Sacharissa in her scorn by a premature revelation of -his hopelessness. Cupid, with him, shoots bis darts lke a Parthian in flight. Besides, the manner in which his ardour found expression, bore about it the appearance at last of affection. Writing, as he did, at long intervals—this natually enough becoming a habit with one altogether without the necessity of toiling at the pen for subsist- ence—Waller invariably wrote and re-wrote with the most exquisite care, and the most painful deliberation. Has he not acknowledged naively, in his comment upon the Earl of Roscommon’s version of Horace ?

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

Unlike Paganini, who was never once heard by his familiar friends to string an instrument, Waller was always applying fresh rosin to his bow, and screwing the strings a little tighter. According to the assurance given by the Duke of Buckingham to the Annotation of our author’s Quarto Edition, he was known to have consumed the greater part of an entire summer in com- posing and correcting just ten lines to be inscribed ina rare copy of Tasso, belonging to her Koyal Highness the Duchess York. Yet the cherrystone was not worth much, after all, even when rubbed into a gloss and carved thus elaborately, It may be doubtless, in explanation of the fastidious caution lavished upon these verses, for the fly-leaf of the Jerusalem Delivered, that he designed them, possibly as a tribute of reverent gratitude to the memory of ‘Torquato, to whose melodious epic, done into English by Mr. Fairfax, he avowed, in the hearing of Mr. Dryden, that he owed whatever smoothness might be discernible in his own flowing and jarmouious versification. In testimony, however, of the poetic faith that was in him, this

:

Upon the haughty and patrician Sacharissa. Ambitious and afiluent himself, ce 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 plory 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 astripling, 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-per- fected 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, fupreme and consummate. Educated successively at Eton and at _Kipg’s College, Cambridge, he took his place at the early period already intimated, among the national legislators at

estminster, aa M.P. for his father’s birthplace, the little Buckingoamshire 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 dioner table, a contest of wits, since then recorded upon the pages of history as in many iespects curiously, even portentously, characceristic. The air of the court infected him : it influenced succebsively his muse, his heart, and. hig ambition. His Yirst poetic effurt was in Joyal celebration of the escape of his 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

significant couplet may be not inaptly cited fiom one cf his Prologues : , Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, Polished like marble, would like marble last.

Tardnened and polished lines like these same marble numbers of Waller, howbeit, were scarcely the fittest medium for a passion imperatively demanding at all times more penetrable stuff for its manifestations. Sacharissa, we may presume, wanted a heart, anc she was offered a gem selected with the taste, and: cut with the adroitness, of the most exquisitely tasteful and cunningly adroit of lapidaries.

Sacharissa, the haughty and the deburnaire, was the first- born .of eight fair daughters—offsprings of the marriage of Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester, with the Lady Dorothea Perey, sister of the celebrated Countess of Carlisie. Sacharissa, chief flower of all this blooming stock,

Queen rose in this rosebud garden of girls ;

was known and admired, during her radiant maidenhood, as the Lady Dorothea Sidney. Subsequently, however, her name was rendered otherwise familiar; first of all, during near half a

wards, by the sweetest appellation lover ever bestowed cn his beloved, to al! after generations. During her life-time, Countess of Sutherland! Perpetually, to all generations, Sa- charissa! Delectable, old, bright-eyed Elia, would infattibly have cailed her (coining a superlative for the nonee) Fortunatest of Ladies ! this—at any rate in one important particular—happy-

buudred and twenty-eight, of the assassination of the royal

| Simply, be it confessed, because there is net anywhere discoverable the faintest vestige of a clue to the date of her birth, leaving that mystery as a problem tobe solved with the quadrature of the circle, or the accurate definition of the | longitude.

| Nowhere has the record of that date proved discernible, or even within the reach of probable conjecture, scrutinizing the /annals of the lady Dorothea’s life from its commencement to (iis termination. It appears, neither down in the Wealde of Kent, upon the register at Penshurst, nor yet again upon the sepulchral monument raised over her dead lord and herself at Brinton, in Northamptonshire. As well attempt, now, to de- note the age of Sacharissa, as to be quite certain (within a century or two) about that of Cagliostro, or perfectly satisfied, again, in regard to the real name or the real country of Psalmanazar. Her years baffle us, not a jot less bewilderingly than the identity of that comely White Rose of England, Perkin Warbeck, or of that ever grimly and ghostly personage, the Man-in-the-iron-mask! At any rate, if it be impossible even to guess when she was born, we know accurately enough when she was married, when she was widowed, and when she died. Married—not, Oh, doleful Muse of Beaconsfield! to Edmund Waller, poet, legislator, and what not—but, upon the eleventh of July, sixteen hundred and thirty nine. to Henry, Lord Spencer, subsequently created, by Charles the First, Eur! of Sutherland! Widowed but four years after her gay bridal morn—when her husband, in the bloom of his manhood (being then but twenty-three), was slain by a cannon-bali while fighting in arms for his king, like a gallant cavalier as he was, on the notable twentieth of September, sixteen hundred and forty-three, in the bloody strife at Newbury. Surviving her young lord full forty years, until the eve of her sepulture, on the twenty- fifth of Pebruary, sixteen hundred and eighty-three, in the | stately vault of the Karis of Sutherland. By Sacharissa the | young. cavalier noble, notwithstanding his premature demise, left three children: one of them asun, heir to kis title and possessions. And so the story of her proud life is told in few words : leaving her forty years in weeds and for ever afterwards in flowers—ilowing, blooming with an eternal fragrance, the flowers of love and poetry woven defily by the band of Waller into a coronal for Sacharissa.

The inceuse of his encoumuns he flung to her with a lavish hand (how affluently !) from the swinging thurible of his verse. Remembering ber relationship with that Bayard of Britain, Sir | Philip Sidney, author of the Arcadia, he exclaimed, while gazing upen the portrait of his mistress, rapt in admiration :

This glorious place transcends what he could think, So much bis blood is nobler than his ink !

Describing her under the leafy covert, surrounding her ancestral home at Penshurst, he makes the very branches lacquey her as she saunters, or clusterabove her head in loving obeisance:

If she sit down, with tops a!] towards ber bow’d They ’round about ber into arbours crowd ;

Or if she walk, in‘even ranks they stand,

Like some weil-marshalled and obsequious band.

Hearing that some one has infamous!y accused her of rouge-

ing: Yes, Heaven the cries out in scornful ire:

Paints her, ’iis true, with the same hand which spreads

Like glorious colours thro’ the flowery meads,

W ben lavish Nature, with her best attire,

Clothes the gay Spring, the season of desire.

Paints her, ’tis true, and does her cheek adorn

W ith the sane art with which she paints the morn ;

With the same art wherewith she gilpeth so,

Those painted clouds which form Thaumantia’s bow.

Ifhe beholds her in his dreams, he thus apostropiises the lovely vision bearing her semblance :

In heaven itself thou sure were’t drest With that angelic-like disguise :

Thus deluded am I blest,

And see my joy with closed eyes.

Deprecating her evident wrath at his audacity all the while he is singing, by reminding her that hig passion is, after al!. merely ,

Ifis humble Jove whose hope shal! ne’er rise higher ‘Than for a pardon that he dares admire.

Chliorig, he commends; Zelinda enlogises ; Amoret, Joves ; but—he confesses even while proffering his tenderness to the gentle nymph Jast mentioned—he adores Sucharissa. He suspects it to be for him an idle and profitiess infatuation. Yet he feels, too, at the same moment, that it is of all his noblest inspiration. Conscious of this he draws an exquisite compari- son between his own tantalising pursuit of her, and that of Daphne by Apoilo: proudly predicting his own Fame (by way of consolation) through an imaginary as beautiful, as it has proved in his and many another kindred instances, marvellously prophetic :

Yet what he eung in his immortal strain,

Tho’ unsuccessful, was not sung in vain;

All but the nyraph that should redress bis wrong, Attend his passion, and approve his song.

Like Phebus thus, acquiring unsought praise, He catched at love, and filled his arms with bays.

It is the epitome of the story of Waller's idolised passion for Sacharissa. A tenderness in the metrical effusion, of which we find him occasionally, we had almost said repeatedly, anticipating some of the loveliest fancies of various after-poets of yet larger reputation. Who shall say but that Waller first suggested to Pope the elphin phantasy of his Rape of the Lock, through the following couplet. It occurs to his epistle to Mrs. Broughton, the Abigail to Sacharissa :

A thousand Cupids in those curls do sit (Those curious nets! thy slender fingers knit).

Was not Gray’s memorable quatrain in the elegy :

Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast ‘The little tyrant of his fields withstood ;

Some mute inglorious Milton there may rest, Some Cromweii guiitiess of his country’s blood,

/ anticipated by those lines of Waller, denoting the need Genius , has of Opportunity ?

Great Julius, on the mountains bred,

A flock, perhaps, or Lerd had led.

He that the world subdued had been

But the best wrestler on the green. And is not the principal charm of Byron’s famous commemora- tion of Kirke White, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, but a lieral transeript from Waller’s ejaculation to his jady-love, singing a song of composing ? That Eagle’s fate and mine are one, Which, on the shaft that made him die, Espy’d a feather of his own,

in Waller’s history, where he observes, in one of those sonorous sentences so provokingly equipoised, “he doubtless praised one whom he would have been afraid to marry, and perhaps married one whom he would have been ashamed to praise.”’ Seo ridiculous was Waller's second wife in the eyes of Johnson, even with Tetty, bis own red-faced Blowsabella vividly surviving in his remembrance ! -

Yet, while Waller's first wife brought him but two, his second probably astonished him with no less than 13 children, —five sons and eight daughters. First Consul Bonaparte would certainly have called her no mediocrity.

Politically, Edmund Waller was a Trimmer of the most shaineless effrontery, proffering his allegiance to whatever power chanced to be in the ascendant—a courtier withthe most flexible knees and the most supple vertebre. His existence, it should be borne in remembrance —beginning in the early spring of sixteen hundred and five and ending in the late autumn of sixteen hundred and cighty-seven—exiended over an interval embracing within it, as by a sort of monopoly, the principal part of the seventeenth century. During the lapse of nearly eivhty- three years he enjoyed the privilege of a personal intercourse with five remarkable sovereigns, with four of whom he is even recorded to have interchanged familiar compliments, His int- inacy with the greatest of them all—his kinsman, Cromwell — he, himself, immediately upon the death of the Lord P¥otector, crowned with that glorious panegyric, which is universally re- cognised as incomparably Ins poetic masterpiece. Yet, with scarcely a momentary pause between, we find him, directly afterwards, chaunting rapturously over the event of the Res- toration ; and when rallied, good-humouredly, by the Merry Monarch, upon the inferiority of the Royalist verses when con- trasted with their Republican predecessors, with the couriliest grace proffering in extenuation that memorable rejoinder, * Poets, Sire, succeed better in Fiction than in Trath.’ His wit, indeed, has few better attestations of its brilliancy than those furnished by other equally well-known and well-authen- ticated palace anecdotes. While, as delichtfully ilustrative of his humorous extravagancies, it willbe sufficient to particularise the reason extracted from hiuwr in palliation of his monstrous eulogium upon the Duchess of Newcastle’s elegiac lines on the Death of a Siag (verses which he had protested he would have given up all his own compositions to have penned ) ** Nothing,”” said he, when charged with the fluttery, ‘* was too much to be given that a lady might be saved from ihe disgrace of such a vile performance.’ But—ah, the vengeance upon Sacharissa. A vengeance drawn down upon herself in the old age of both—of the quandom lover and the whilome beauty. When would Mr. Waller again write verses upon her? asked Sacharissa. Fancy the bow of the old beau among his rustling lace and his dowing knots,—among his wrinkles and his love locks, as he replied with the frostiest smile upon his withered lips, ** When you are as young, Madam, and as handsome as you were then!”

The slighted poet was, indeed, avenged. If, however, the lady Dorothea possessed within herself the slightest sense of a pretension to anything like decent consistency of character it could scarcely have been aught else to her but matter for earnest self-gratulation that she liad once, in her sagacious youth, rejected & man whose whole life, after that rejection, might be accurately designated as one long series of startling antitheses and disgraceful contradictions. Hig political tergiversation was, tothe very last degree, flagrant anc unbiushing. Upon no palliative or explanatory hypothesis that coulé possibly be dreamed of, can his principles be reconciled, or his actions harmonised. As a Parliamentary representative he could %o energetically conduct the prosecution of Sir Francis Crawley, one of the twelve judges who had declared the legality offevy- ing ship money, that, of the famous speech in which he advocated the interests of the nation and the cause of the legislature—an outburst of rhetorical logic and eloquent vituperation, in the midst of which he strikingly compares the beggary of the realm for the mere purpose of supplying the navy to the barbarity of seething a kid in its mother’s milk—there were sold in a single day copies to the number of not less than twenty thousand. Yet this enthusiastic and impassioned conductor of Crewley’s impeaehment could afterwards, with admirable consistency, send athousand broad pieces to the king when Charles the First set up the royal standard at Nottingham, and could subsequently allow himself to be so bewitched by his Majesty's kind reception of him at Oxford after the battle of Edgehiti, tnat he 18 notoriously known to have engaged a little ater in a treasonous conspiracy against the Commonwealth. The particulars of that futile plot—a plotso futile that Hume speaks of it simply as a project, Lingard even mentioning it as imagi- nary—are altogether too familiar to the students of our national history to, be here recapitulated.. lis discovery, while it cost two of Waller’s accomplices their heads, cost the poet himeelf a temporary incarceration, a fine of ten thousand pounds, and eventually banishment. Worse than all, it cost him bis reputation. During the period of his exile in France, an event of interest befell the pardoned but disgraced conspirator. There appeared at London in eixteen hundred and forty eight the very first editon of his works ever published : an enterprise originated by some unknown lady who bad written to him in his foreign seclusion, requesting him to send her all his various poems collected together in manuscript. Could this nameless fair one, by any wild possibility. have been Sacharissa ?

Ultimately Waller was permitted to return homeward, a blot on his escutcheon, and considerably reduced in his circum- stances. It was then he took up his abode upon the last remnant of his fortunes at Halibarn, near his mother’s residence and his own former estate at Beaconsfield. Ile subsequently

Wherewith he wont to soar so high.

Thus eloquently did Waller breathe through his oaten reed the tones of love and flattery, Vainly, however, as we have seen when those notes were syllabled to Sacharissa, Imme- | diately upon her rather conclusive rejection of his addresses,it | has been conjectured that, for the purpose of dissipating his anguish, he accompanied the Earl of Warwick in an expedition to the Bermudas. He consoled himself in effect rather differ-

century, by her husband’s title, to her contemporaries ; often ently, however, under the poignancy of his disappointment.

And Sacharissa knew it! He fled for comfort to the arms of, a second wife, a sort of French Wiifrid (a personage, it may be reinembered, described by Lord Jeffreys as “ tame rabbit boiled | ‘to rags,’’) a lady, in truth, of such absolute insignificance, | ‘individually, that it remains. to this day a mooted question,

| whether her maiden-name were Teally Bresse or Breaux. Ter-|

resumed his old position in the legislature, continuing throughout another generation to be the delight, and, in some sort also, the boast of Parliament. His literary reputation was scarcely es- tablisned. It obtained—a marvel in those days—a continental recognition among his own immediate contemporaries. He himself, it is true, by coolly writing in one of his letters: ‘** The old blind schoolmaster John Milton hath published a tedious poem on the fall of man,” could perfectly justify, in that one sentence, the accusation of envy directed against hin by Atterbury. But Envy was not the Shadow of his own Merit. He was on the contrary the very Schlemi! of popularity, Alex- ander Pope has taught the merest tyro in verse to

praise the easy vigour of a Jine Where Denham’s strength und Waller's sweetness join. Mr. Addison has declared the perpetuity of his renown as synonymous with the existence of the language, when he hae predicted, So long shall Waller's strains our passion move, Aud Sacharissa’s beauty kindle love. On the twenty-first of October sixteen bundred and eighty- seven, he peacelully breathed his last at Beaconsfield.

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Luckxnow.—This city, where the English residents heve been in great peril, is the capital of Oude, the kingdom which the English recently annexed to their other India possessions. Its population is sbout 200,000, and it is situated on the south side of the river Goomty, which is at all times navigable, and falls into the Ganges between Benares and Gazypoor. By the nearest road it is 650 miles from Caleutfa, 280 miles from Delhy. 202 miles from Agra, and 189 miles from Benares, all import- ant points at this moment,

‘The streets in Lucknow occupied by the lower classes are sunk 10 or 12 feet below the surface, and are so narrow that carts can scarcely pass each other; but the palaces, mosques and baria! grounds are gorgeously magnificent. It was some years since one of the largest and richest cities in Hindostan.

A large stone was thrown at a passing train on the Eastern Counties Railway, and entering the carriage, struck Professor

go lucky Dorothea, Countess of Sutherland. And why? ‘rible is the comment, uttered by Dr. Johneon upon this incident Rogers, of Boston, in the face, breaking his jaw bone.

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