described by Lord Jeffreys as a tame rabbit boiled to rags")-a lady, in truth, of such absolute insignificance, individually, that it remains to this day a moot question, whether her maiden-name were really Bresse or Breaux. Terrible is the comment, uttered by Dr. Johnson upon this incident 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." This, recollect, from one who, having himself espoused (with all her vulgarity) Mistress Elizabeth Porter in a very rapture of admiration, consecrated her from the ridicule of all, saving only Lord Macaulay in the Encyclopædia Britannica-so consecrating her by the tender affection hallowing even the absurd diminutive of Tetty in those prayers written down in his old age by the great secular ecclesiastic-that lay-bishop in the scratch wig and the rusty-brown coat, instead of in the sleeves of lawn and the apron of prunella. So ridiculous was Waller's second wife in the eyes of Johnson, even with Tetty, his 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 thirteen 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 shameless effrontery, proffering his allegiance to whatever power chanced to be in the ascendant-a courtier with the most flexile knees and the most supple vertebræ. 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 eighty-seven-extended over an interval embracing within it, as by a sort of monopoly, the principal part of the seventeenth century. During the lapse of nearly eighty-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 intimacy with the greatest of them all-his kinsman, Cromwell-he, himself, immediately upon the death of the Lord Protector, crowned with that glorious panegyric, which is universally recognised as incomparably Waller's poetic masterpiece. Yet, with scarcely a momentary pause between, we find him, directly afterwards, chanting exultantly over the event of the Restoration; and when rallied, good-humouredly, by the Merry Monarch, upon the inferiority of the Royalist verses when the latter came to be contrasted with their Republican predecessors, with the

courtliest grace proffering in extenuation that memorable rejoinder "Poets, Sire, succeed better in Fiction than in Truth." His wit, indeed, has few better attestations of its brilliancy than those furnished by other equally well-known and well-authenticated palace anecdotes. While, as delightfully illustrative of his humorous extravagancies, it will be sufficient to particularise the reason extracted from him in palliation of his monstrous eulogium upon the Duchess of Newcastle's elegiac lines on the Death of a Stag (verses which he had protested he would have given up all his own compositions to have penned). "Nothing," said he, when charged with the flattery, "was too much to be given that a lady might be saved from the 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 quondam lover and the whilome beauty. When would Mr. Waller again write verses upon her? asks Sacharissa. Fancy the bow of the old beau among his rustling lace and his flowing knots among his wrinkles and his lovelocks, as he replies with the frostiest smile upon his withered lips-" When you are as young, Madam, and as handsome as you were then!" It is like a sprinkle of vitriol over a rosebush.

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 selfgratulation that she had once, in her sagacious youth, rejected a man whose whole life, after that rejection, might be accurately described as one long series of startling antitheses and disgraceful contradictions. His political tergiversation was, to the very last degree, flagrant and unblushing. Upon no palliative or explanatory hypothesis that could possibly be dreamed of, can his principles be reconciled, or his actions harmonised. As a Parliamentary representative he could so energetically conduct the prosecution of Sir Francis Crawley, one of the twelve judges who had declared the legality of levying 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 Crawley's impeachment could afterwards, with admirable consistency, send a thousand 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 Edgehill, that he is notoriously known to have been engaged a little later on, in a treacherous conspiracy against the Commonwealth. The particulars of that futile plot a plot so futile that Hume speaks of it simply as a project, Lingard even mentioning it as imaginary-are altogether too familiar to the students of our national history to be here recapitulated. Its discovery, while it cost two of Waller's accomplices their heads, cost the poet himself a temporary incarceration, a fine of ten thousand pounds, and eventually banishment. Worse than all, it cost him his reputation. It is a melancholy spectacle, in truth, that presented to us by Waller's many despicable evidences about this time, now of tergiversation, now of pusillanimity. His submission was so abject, his fear so overwhelming. During the period of his exile in France, an event of particular interest befell the pardoned but disgraced conspirator. There appeared at London in 1648 the very first edition of his works ever published: an enterprise originated by some unknown lady who had 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 beenSacharissa?

Ultimately, Waller was permitted to return homeward, a blot on his escutcheon and sorely reduced in his circumstances. It was then he took up his abode upon the last remnant of his fortunes at Hallbarn, near his mother's residence and his own former estate at Beaconsfield. He subsequently 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 securely established. 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 school. master 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 him by Atterbury. But Envy was not the shadow of his own merit. He was on the contrary the very Schlemil of popularity. Alexander Pope has taught the merest tyro in verse to

"-praise the easy vigour of a line

Where Denham's strength and Waller's sweetness join."

Mr. Addison has declared the perpetuity of his renown to be synonymous with the existence of the language, namely, where he has formally predicted

"So long shall Waller's strains our passion move,

And Sacharissa's beauty kindle love."

On the twenty-first of October, in the year 1687, the old Poet, and yet older Courtier, peacefully breathed his last in his ancestral home at Beaconsfield.

WILLIAM NAPIER-THE SOLDIER-ANNALIST.

It is scarcely probable that the world will soon, if indeed it can ever, again witness so singular a combination of hereditary peculiarities as that which distinguished the five sons of Colonel the Honourable George Napier of Celbridge, in the county of Dublin. Their ancestry, like a famous parliamentary majority recorded in one of the later volumes of "Hansard" was nothing less than a fortuitous concurrence.' And, in its result, it certainly goes far to prove that a mixture of races tends as directly to the elevation of the individual character, as it unquestionably does towards the advancement and invigoration of the genius of distinct nationalities. Of the latter remarkable truth the annals and exploits of the Anglo-Saxon family afford of themselves conclusive attestation. It is, for all the world, like the imperceptible growth of a running stream-"a rivulet, now a river"-widened and deepened in its progress by the influx of many important tributaries. Into the main current of the historic lineage of the Napiers, it is curious to note in this way how many and how important were those tributaries. They secured to it whatever ambi-dexterous advantages might be supposed to result from the infusion into the blood of the Napiers, of the divine ichor of two royal houses-those of Henry IV. of France, and of Charles II. of England. They rendered kindred to that same heroic blood, the blood of two chivalrous but attainted traitors to the Crown-the great Montrose and the unfortunate and chivalrous Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Through the maternal line they enabled these five brothers to claim the sympathies of relationship with Charles Fox, the orator of the Liberal Opposition; and through the paternal line, farther back by one or two generations, and higher in the intellectual atmosphere, in the very empyrean of abstract philosophy, to trace their descent directly from the renowned inventor of logarithms, the immortal John Napier of Merchistoun.