little
poetry. Although the king, jealous of his subjects, had, in 1632, by a
most absurd and arbitrary decree, commanded all the lords and gentry in
the kingdom to reside on their own estates, Waller did not at the time
consider this an exceeding hardship. Indeed, his feelings were on no
subject, and under no pressure of circumstances, either very profound or
very lasting.

His wife died after having borne him a son and a daughter--a son, who
did not long survive his mother; and a daughter, who became afterwards
Mrs. Dormer of Oxfordshire. From under this calamity Waller, yet only
thirty years of age, rebounded with characteristic elasticity. He came
back, nothing both, to the society he had left, and was soon known to be
in quest of a fair lady, whom he has made immortal by the sobriquet of
Saccharissa. She was the eldest daughter of the Earl of Leicester, and
her name was the Lady Dorothy Sidney. This lady was counted beautiful.
Her father was absent in foreign parts. She lived almost alone in
Penshurst. It added to her charms, at least in a poetical eye, that she
was descended from Sir Philip Sidney; a man whose name, as the flower of
chivalry and the soul of honour, is still "like ointment poured forth"
in the estimation of the world--whose death rises almost to the dignity
and grandeur of a martyrdom--and who has left in his "Arcadia" a
quaintly decorated, conceived, and unequally chiselled, but true, rich,
and magnificent monument of his genius. In spite, however, of all
Waller's tender ditties, of the incense he offered up--not only to
Dorothy, but to her sister Lady Lucy, and even to her maid Mrs.
Braughton--his goddess was inexorable, and not only rejected, but
spurned him from her feet. The poet bore this disappointment, as all
poets, Dante hardly excepted, have borne the same: he transferred his
affections to another, who, indeed, ere Saccharissa-like the sun had set
in the west, had risen like the moon in the east of her lover's
admiration, and soon, although only for a short time, possessed the sky
alone. This was his Amoret, who is said to have been Lady Sophia Murray.
The Juliet, however, was not one whit more placable than the Rosalind--
she, too, rejected his suit; and this rejection threw Waller, not into
despair or melancholy, but into a wide sea of miscellaneous flirtations,
with we know not how many Chlorises, Sylvias, Phyllises, and Flavias,
all which names stood, it seems, for real persons, and t