WALLER, wrd'h7r, EDMUND (I 606-87) . An English poet, born at Coleshill, in Buckingham shire, March 3, 1606. He was sent to Eton, and thence to King's College, Cambridge (162(1). The seems to have left the university without a de gree. It appears that at the age of eighteen (perhaps earlier) lie obtained a seat in Par liament for Anwrshams fter the death of his wife (1634), Waller courted Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of the second Earl of Leicester. whom he commemorated in verse under the name of Saeharissa. In the Long Parliament Waller joined the party of his cousin Hamp den, but when the attack was made on Strafford and the episcopacy (1641) he began to move toward the Royalist side and was soon won over. In 1613 he was appointed by Par liament one of the commissioners to negoti ate with King Charles, then at Oxford. On this occasion he was drawn into a plot to se cure the city of London for the King. Some of his colleagues were hanged. He himself was fined £10,000 and banished the kingdom (No vember, 1644). After an exile of seven years,
spent mostly in France, Waller was pardoned, November, 1651. Returning to England, he now gave his support to the Commonwealth, and was sulisequently appointed a commissioner of trade (1655). After the Restoration he was elected to Parliament for Hastings (1661), and continued a member down to his death. Ile died at Beaeonstield, the family estate in Ilueking hanishire. ()molter 21, 1687. pdition, of his collected poems appeared in 1645, and new editions with added poems were frequent after the Restoration. The heroic couplet he reduced to an :n t. Waller has long since ceased to inter est, a wide public. but he lives for a few perfect little poems, such as the song beginning "Co, lovely ruse," and the lines "On a Girdle." Con sult his Poems, edited by T. Drury (Muses' Library. London, 181)3) ; and F. A. Gosse, Seven heath Century Studics (new ed. 1897).