Lives of the Poets | Page 3

twentieth year. He is apparently
mistaken; for the mention of the nation's
obligations to her frequent
pregnancy proves that it was written when she had brought many
children. We have therefore no date of any other poetical production
before that which the murder of the Duke of Buckingham occasioned;
the steadiness with which the king received the news in the chapel

deserved indeed to be rescued from oblivion.
Neither of these pieces that seem to carry their own dates could have
been the sudden effusion of fancy. In the verses on the prince's escape,
the prediction of his marriage with the Princess of France must have
been written after the event; in the other, the promises of the king's
kindness to the descendants of Buckingham, which could not be
properly praised till it had appeared by its effects, show that time was
taken for revision and improvement. It is not known that they were
published till they appeared long afterwards with other poems.
Waller was not one of those idolaters of praise who cultivate their
minds at the expense of their fortunes. Rich as he was by
inheritance,
he took care early to grow richer, by marrying Mrs. Banks, a great
heiress in the city, whom the interest of the court was employed to
obtain for Mr. Crofts. Having brought him a son, who died young, and
a daughter, who was afterwards married to Mr. Dormer, of Oxfordshire,
she died in childbed, and left him a widower of about five-and-twenty,
gay and wealthy, to please himself with another marriage.
Being too young to resist beauty, and probably too vain to think
himself resistible, he fixed his heart, perhaps half-fondly and
half-ambitiously, upon the Lady Dorothea Sidney, eldest daughter of
the Earl of Leicester, whom he courted by all the poetry in which
Sacharissa is celebrated; the name is derived from the Latin appellation
of "sugar," and implies, if it means anything, a spiritless mildness, and
dull good-nature, such as excites rather tenderness and esteem, and
such as, though always treated with kindness, is never honoured or
admired.
Yet he describes Sacharissa as a sublime predominating beauty, of lofty
charms, and imperious influence, on whom he looks with amazement
rather than fondness, whose chains he wishes, though in vain, to break,
and whose presence is "wine" that "inflames to madness."
His acquaintance with this high-born dame gave wit no opportunity of
boasting its influence; she was not to be subdued by the powers of
verse, but rejected his addresses, it is said, with disdain, and drove him

away to solace his disappointment with Amoret or Phillis. She married
in 1639 the Earl of Sunderland, who died at Newbury in the king's
cause; and, in her old age, meeting somewhere with Waller, asked him,
when he would again write such verses upon her; "When you are as
young, Madam," said he, "and as handsome as you were then."
In this part of his life it was that he was known to Clarendon, among
the rest of the men who were eminent in that age for genius and
literature; but known so little to his advantage, that they who read his
character will not much condemn Sacharissa, that she did not descend
from her rank to his embraces, nor think every
excellence comprised
in wit.
The lady was, indeed, inexorable; but his uncommon comprised in wit,
qualifications, though they had no power upon her, recommended him
to the scholars and statesmen; and undoubtedly many beauties of that
time, however they might receive his love, were proud of his praises.
Who they were, whom he dignifies with poetical names, cannot now be
known. Amoret, according to Mr. Fenton, was the Lady Sophia Murray.
Perhaps by traditions preserved in families more may be discovered.
From the verses written at Penshurst, it has been collected that he
diverted his disappointment by a voyage; and his biographers, from his
poem on the Whales, think it not improbable that he visited the
Bermudas; but it seems much more likely that he should amuse himself
with forming an imaginary scene, than that so important an incident, as
a visit to America, should have been left floating in conjectural
probability.
From his twenty-eighth to his thirty-fifth year, he wrote his pieces on
the Reduction of Sallee; on the Reparation of St. Paul's; to the King on
his Navy; the Panegyric on the Queen Mother; the two poems to the
Earl of Northumberland; and perhaps others, of which the time cannot
be discovered.
When he had lost all hopes of Sacharissa, he looked round him for an
easier conquest, and gained a lady of the family of Bresse, or Breaux.
The time of his marriage is not exactly known. It has not been

discovered that his wife was won by his poetry; nor is anything told of