and she admired them, and him too, perhaps, but not as a lover. As a poet he was welcome to praise her; to call her nymph, goddess, and the like; to languish and die for her, He chose: but when it came to making love to her in his own person, it was another matter. And to expect her to return his love, was worst of all. She rejected him with disdain and scorn. Whether she considered herself his superior in rank, or thought him a little too old (there was a difference of fifteen years in their ages), or, what is more likely, loved somebody else better, we are left to conjecture. The Earl, her father, being abroad at the time, Waller wrote to him, and pressed him to come home, and decide the matter.

"That beam of beauty, which begun

To warm us so when thou wert here,
Now scorches like the raging sun,
When Sirius does first appear.

O fix this flame! and let despair
Redeem the rest from endless care."

But he might as well have saved his verses, for the Lady Dorothea fixed the flame herself, by bestowing her heart on Henry, Lord Spencer, afterwards Earl of Sunderland. They were married at Penshurst on the 11th of July, 1639. Waller bore his disappointment like a man of the world, and wrote Lady Lucy Sydney, a younger sister of the bride, a witty letter on the occasion. It may be found in Fenton's edition of Waller's works, and in Mrs. Jameson's "LOVES OF THE POETS." Of the subsequent history of Lady Spencer, or as she is more generally called, Lady Sunderland, little remains to be told. She led a happy life with her lord till the breaking out of the civil war, when he left her to follow the fortunes of the king. His career in the field was a short one, for he was slain by a cannon-ball at the battle of Newbury, on the 20th of September, 1643. She retired to his estate in Northamptonshire with her children, and lived in seclusion, till 1652, when she married Mr. Robert Smythe, a Kentish gentleman of good family. Waller and she met one day at Lady Wharton's, years afterwards, when they were both old people. "Mr. Waller," she asked him, "when will you write such fine verses on me again?" "O madam," the old wit replied, "when your ladyship is as young again." She died on the 25th of February, 1683-4, and was buried at Brinton, in Northamptonshire, in the same vault with her first husband. Waller married a second time, shortly after Saccharissa's marriage with Lord Spencer, but nothing is known of his second wife, save that her name was Bresse, or Breaux, and that she bore him a large family of children.

It is not known with certainty when the love poems of Waller were written, but as they were printed six years after the Lady Dorothea's first marriage, they probably extended over the space of seven years, or from 1638 to 1645. The majority of them were written, I imagine, in 1638–9, and revised at various times until they reached their present state of perfection. Waller was a slow and laborious writer, and was never tired of polishing his trifles. It took him the greater part of a summer on one occasion to write ten lines in a copy of Tasso! There are some twelve or fourteen poems in his works in praise of Saccharissa. She figures in the earlier ones as the Lady Dorothea, or Dorothy; but as Waller's passion (?) increased, she became Saccharissa;

"a name," says his editor, Fenton, "which recalls to mind what is related of the Turks, who in their gallantries think Sucar Birpara, i. e. bit of sugar, to be the most polite and endearing compliment they can use to the ladies." Besides these poems he wrote others of the same sort, addressed to Amoret, Chloris, Phyllis, Sylvia, Zelinda, etc., all real persons, his biographers assure us, with whom he was in love at various times. The first of these poetical dames shared his heart and song with the cruel Saccharissa. was the Lady Sophia Murray; Chloris is supposed to have been Mrs. Wharton. rest are shadows now, whatever they were once.

She

The

AT PENSHURST.

Had Dorothea lived when mortals made
Choice of their deities, this sacred shade
Had held an altar to her power, that gave
The peace and glory which these alleys have;
Embroidered so with flowers where she stood,
That it became a garden of a wood.

Her presence has such more than human grace,
That it can civilize the rudest place;

And beauty too, and order, can impart,
Where Nature ne'er intended it, nor art.

The plants acknowledge this, and her admire,
Not less than those of old did Orpheus' lyre.

If she sit down, with tops all towards her bowed,
They round about her into arbours crowd;
Or if she walk, in even ranks they stand,
Like some well-marshalled and obsequious band.
Amphion so made stones and timber leap
Into fair figures from a confused heap;
And in the symmetry of her parts is found
A power like that of harmony in sound.

Ye lofty beeches, tell this matchless dame,
That if together ye fed all one flame,
It could not equalize the hundredth part
Of what her eyes have kindled in my heart!
Go, boy, and carve this passion on the bark
Of yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark
Of noble Sidney's birth; when such benign,
Such more than mortal-making stars did shine,