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.
He was educated, by the care of his mother, at Eton; and removed afterwards to King's
College, in Cambridge. He was sent to Parliament in his eighteenth, if not in his sixteenth
year, and frequented the court of James the First, where he heard a very remarkable
conversation, which the writer of the Life prefixed to his Works, who seems to have been
well informed of facts, though he may sometimes err in chronology, has delivered as
indubitably certain:
"He found Dr. Andrews, Bishop of Winchester, and Dr. Neale, Bishop of Durham,
standing behind his Majesty's chair; and there happened something extraordinary,"
continues this writer, "in the conversation those prelates had with the king, on which Mr.
Waller did often reflect. His Majesty asked the bishops, 'My Lords, cannot I take my
subject's money, when I want it, without all this formality of Parliament?' The Bishop of
Durham readily answered, 'God forbid, Sir, but you should: you are the breath of our
nostrils.' Whereupon the king turned and said to the Bishop of Winchester, 'Well, my
Lord, what say you?' 'Sir,' replied the bishop, 'I have no skill to judge of Parliamentary
cases. The king answered, 'No put-offs, my Lord; answer me presently.' 'Then, Sir,' said
he, 'I think it is lawful for you to take my brother Neale's money; for he offers it.' Mr.
Waller said the company was pleased with this answer, and the wit of it seemed to affect
the king; for a certain lord coming in soon after, his Majesty cried out, 'Oh, my lord, they
say you lig with my Lady.' 'No, Sir,' says his lordship in confusion; 'but I like her
company, because she has so much wit.' 'Why, then,' says the king, 'do you not lig with
my Lord of Winchester there?'"
Waller's political and poetical life began nearly together. In his eighteenth year he wrote
the poem that appears first in his works, on "The Prince's Escape at St. Andero:" a piece
which justifies the observation made by one of his editors, that he attained, by a felicity
like instinct, a style which perhaps will never be obsolete; and that "were we to judge
only by the wording, we could not know what was wrote at twenty, and what at'
fourscore." His versification was, in his first essay, such as it appears in his last
performance. By the perusal of Fairfax's translation of Tasso, to which, as Dryden relates,
he confessed himself indebted for the smoothness of his numbers, and by his own nicety
of observation, he had already formed such a system of metrical harmony as he never
afterwards much needed, or much endeavoured, to improve. Denham corrected his
