Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/207

Rh The services of Waller and Denham were in the main metrical. In their poems the decasyllabic couplet regained some of the regularity and balance it had lost in the rugged lines and abrupt enjambments which Donne and Jonson encouraged. This is true at any rate of Waller. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Waller was elected to Parliament at the age of sixteen; carried off a wealthy city wife in 1631; became after her death an intimate of the circle to which Falkland and Edward Hyde belonged, and the suitor of Lady Dorothy Sidney, the Sacharissa to whom his polished love-verses are addressed. He took an active part in the Long Parliament, following the moderate constitutional line of Hyde, but in the famous plot of 1643 lost his nerve, and behaved in a way which Clarendon has branded. Like others, he later made his peace with Cromwell, and wrote on him the noblest of his poems. Like others, he followed it up with eulogy of Charles restored.

"Smooth" is the epithet with which Waller's name is linked, and it is the most obvious feature of all his eulogistic verses and elegant songs, which were written at different times from about 1623 to the end of his long life. He was not the first poet to write smooth and balanced couplets, but he cultivated the art more consciously and conscientiously than any of his predecessors and contemporaries, stimulated, he says,—and there is no reason to doubt his word,—by admiration of the closing couplet in the ottava rima of Fairfax's Tasso. Waller's smoothness, like Balzac's polished