Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

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Samuel Johnson. Lives of the English Poets : Waller, Milton, Cowley

INTRODUCTION

WALLER

MILTON

Paradise Lost

Adam Unparadised

COWLEY

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Edmund Waller was born on the third of March, 1605, at Coleshill, in Hertfordshire.  His father was Robert Waller, Esquire, of Agmondesham, in Buckinghamshire, whose family was originally a branch of the Kentish Wallers; and his mother was the daughter of John Hampden, of Hampden, in the same county, and sister to Hampden, the zealot of rebellion.

His father died while he was yet an infant, but left him a yearly income of three thousand five hundred pounds; which, rating together the value of money and the customs of life, we may reckon more than equivalent to ten thousand at the present time.

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To this opposition, the Biographia imputes the violence and acrimony with which Waller joined Buckingham’s faction in the prosecution of Clarendon.  The motive was illiberal and dishonest, and showed that more than sixty years had not been able to teach him morality.  His accusation is such as conscience can hardly be supposed to dictate without the help of malice.  “We were to be governed by Janizaries instead of Parliaments, and are in danger from a worse plot than that of the fifth of November; then, if the Lords and Commons had been destroyed, there had been a succession; but here both had been destroyed for ever.”  This is the language of a man who is glad of an opportunity to rail, and ready to sacrifice truth to interest at one time, and to anger at another.

A year after the chancellor’s banishment, another vacancy gave him encouragement for another petition, which the king referred to the Council, who, after hearing the question argued by lawyers for three days, determined that the office could be held only by a clergyman, according to the Act of Uniformity, since the provosts had always received institution as for a parsonage from the Bishops of Lincoln.  The king then said he could not break the law which he had made; and Dr. Zachary Cradock, famous for a single sermon, at most for two sermons, was chosen by the Fellows.

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