WALLER, EDMUND English poet, was born on March 9, 1606, the eldest son of Robert Waller of Coleshill and Anne Hampden, his wife. Early in his childhood his father moved to Beaconsfield. Waller was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge. He left without a degree, and it is believed that in 1621 he sat as a member for Agmondesham (Amersham) in the last parliament of James I. Clarendon says that Waller was "nursed in parliaments." In that of 1624 he represented Ilches ter, and in the first of Charles I. Chipping Wycombe. The first act by which Waller distinguished himself, however, was his sur reptitious marriage with a wealthy ward of the Court of Alder men, in 1631. He was brought before the Star Chamber for this offence, and heavily fined. After bearing him a son and a daugh ter at Beaconsfield, Mrs. Waller died in 1634. It was about this time that the poet was elected into Falkland's "Club." It is supposed that about 1635 he met Lady Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of the earl of Leicester, who was then eighteen years of age. He formed a romantic passion for this girl, whom he celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. She rejected him, and married Lord Spencer in 1639. In 1640 Waller was once more M.P. for Amersham; later, in the Long Parliament, he represented St. Ives. Waller had hitherto supported the party of Pym, but he now left him for the group of Falkland and Hyde. An extraor dinary and obscure conspiracy against Parliament, in favour of the king, which is known as "Waller's Plot," occupied the spring of 1643, but on May 3o he and his friends were arrested. In the terror of discovery, Waller was accused of di-nlaying a very mean poltroonery, and of confessing "whatever he had said, heard, thought or seen, and all that he knew . . . or suspected of others." Waller was called before the bar of the House in July, and made an abject speech of recantation. His life was spared and he was committed to the Tower, whence, on paying a fine of f io,000, he was released and banished the realm in Nov. 1643. He married a second wife, Mary Bracey of Thame, and went over to Calais, afterwards taking up his residence at Rouen.
In 1645 the Poems of Waller were first published in London, in three editions. Many of the lyrics were already set to music by Henry Lawes. In 1646 Waller travelled with Evelyn in Switz
erland and Italy. During the worst period of the exile Waller managed to "keep a table" for the Royalists in Paris, although in order to do so he was obliged to sell his wife's jewels. At the close of 1651 the House of Commons revoked Waller's sentence of banishment, and he was allowed to return to Beaconsfield, where he lived very quietly until the Restoration.
In 1655 he published A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, and was made a Commissioner for Trade a month or two later. He followed this up, in 166o, by a poem To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return. Being challenged by Charles II. to explain why this latter piece was inferior to the eulogy of Crom well, the poet smartly replied, "Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction." He entered the House of Commons again in 1661, as M.P. for Hastings, and Burnet has recorded that for the next quarter of a century "it was no House if Waller was not there." His sympathies were tolerant and kindly, and he con stantly defended the Nonconformists. One famous speech of Waller's was : "Let us look to our Government, fleet and trade, 'tis the best advice the oldest Parliament man among you can give you, and so God bless you." After the death of his second wife, in 1677, Waller retired to his house called Hall Barn at Beacons field. In 1661 he had published his poem, St. James' Park; in 1664 he had collected his poetical works; in 1666 appeared his Instruc tions to a Painter; and in 1685 his Divine Poems. The final col lection of his works is dated 1686, but there were posthumous additions made in 1690. He died at Hall Barn, with his children and his grandchildren about him, on Oct. 21, 1687.
Waller's lyrics were at one time admired to excess, but with the exception of "Go, lovely Rose" and one or two others, they have greatly lost their charm. His fancy was plain and trite. He made writing in the serried couplet the habit and the fashion. It was this regular heroic measure which was carried to so high a perfection by Dryden and Pope.
The only critical edition of Waller's Poetical Works is that edited, with a careful biography, by G. Thorn-Drury, in 1893. (E. G.; X.)