difference between public and private utterance as between Otway's:

Two things in sweet Retirement much desir'd,
A generous Bottle and a lovesome She...

and the same poet's letters to Mrs. Barry (signed "Weeping Otway," &c.) in this strain:

I love, I doat, I am mad, and know no measure, nothing but Extremes give me Ease; the kindest Love, or most provoking scorn. . .

and

Generally with Wine or Conversation I diverted or appeased the Demon that possessed me; but when at Night, returning to my unhappy self, to give my Heart an Account why I had done it so unnatural a Violence, it was then I always paid a treble interest for the short Moments of Ease, which I had borrowed; then every treacherous Thought rose up, and took your part, nor left me till they had thrown me on my Bed, and opened those sluices of Tears, that were to run till morning. . .

This unconvincing style was the penalty which Otway had to pay for the sins of his age. He was not without those sins, but there seems no reason to question the extremity of his passion for Mrs. Barry, an actress who played leading parts in almost all of Otway's plays, and became the Earl of Rochester's mistress. It must have needed courage as well as love to preserve a passion

for the scornful mistress of Rochester, and despair is said to have been Otway's reason for enlisting in the army in 1678 when he was twenty-six. In a society so debauched even had a man been able to write lovepoems, he might well have blushed to have it known.

Johnson may have been unjust to Waller when he described him as submitting to the disdain of Lady Dorothea Sidney, his Sacharissa,” and looking about for an easier conquest; but his criticism is just to the majority of poets in the age inaugurated by Waller. It has not been discovered, says Johnson, that his second wife was won by poetry, "nor is anything told of her, but that she brought him many children. He doubtless praised some whom he would have been afraid to marry; and perhaps married one whom he would have been ashamed to praise. Many qualities contribute to domestic happiness, upon which poetry has no colours to bestow; and many airs and sallies may delight imagination, which he who flatters them never can approve. There are charms made only for distant admiration.” Sacharissa was about twelve years younger than Waller, and he met her before she was twenty. None of his poems to her retains any trace of passion, if it ever had any.

Waller was a man who could write pretty well on anybody or anything, and he wrote no better on Sacharissa than on Lady Carlisle or the Queen. He wanted to marry Lady Dorothy but was put off, and having no strong inclinations of any kind, or any characteristic subject-matter, he wrote about her. When he wrote his best, as we should have expected, and as Mr. Thorn Drury points out, there is no evidence that Sacharissa was his theme. "Go, lovely rose" and "On a Girdle" are tributes not to her but to the spirit of love and to a combination of circumstances which we have still to call by the name of accident, well knowing that it is nothing of the kind. This, of course, by no means implies that Waller did not know love. Something may be true of him like what was said of Cowley, another poet whose love does not-as his friendship does-ring true, that he was "much in love with his Leonora," who married some one else, "and Cowley never was in love with anybody after."

It was characteristic of the age that its poets wrote love-poetry which could not be supposed to have any cause or aim but a casual kiss, and that its critic should be content to separate poetry from qualities contributing to domestic happiness. Where

true feeling was so much forbidden to poetry, a spurred extravagance of style in praise of slight or simulated feeling was bound to appear, so as to incur the critic's censure, that "the Empire of Beauty is represented as exerting its influence further than can be allowed by the multiplicity of human passions, and the variety of human wants. Such books, therefore, may be considered as showing the world under a false appearance, and, so far as they obtain credit from the young and inexperienced, as misleading expectation and misguiding practice."

Gray wrote hardly any love-poetry, and what he wrote is his worst, if we except his sonnet on the death of Richard West, and that, inspired by a man, is among his finest. This artificial and unemotional poetry is as foreign to us as Chinese, but it has also in its perfection, the charm as well as the disadvantage of foreignness. Time has made some of it a parody of itself, and Prior's "To Chloe Weeping"

See, whilst thou weepst, fair Chloe, see
The world in sympathy with thee-

deceives nobody and can or must be read as laughing with us at itself. As Prior said himself: