Burnet says that ’Waller was the delight of the House:  And even at eighty he said the liveliest things of any among them:  He was only concerned to say that which should make him be applauded.  But he never laid the business of the House to heart, being a vain and empty, tho’ a witty, man’ (History of His Own Time, ed. 1724, vol. i, p. 388).  He is described by Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed.  A. Clark, vol. ii, pp. 276-7.

Clarendon’s character was included by Johnson in his Life of Waller, with a few comments.  Page 179, l. 1. a very rich wife, Anne, only daughter of John Bankes, mercer; married 1631, died 1634.  ’The fortune which Waller inherited from his father, which must have been largely increased during his long minority, has been variously estimated at from L2,000 to L3,500 a year; adding to this the amount which he received with Miss Bankes, said to have been about L8,000, and allowing for the difference in the value of the money, it appears probable that, with the exception of Rogers, the history of English literature can show no richer poet’ (Poems of Waller, ed.  Thorn Drury, vol. i, p. xx).

l. 4. M’r Crofts, William Crofts (1611-77), created Baron Crofts of Saxham in 1658 at Brussels.  He was captain of Queen Henrietta Maria’s Guards.

l. 6. D’r Marly.  See p. 92, l. 21, note.

ll. 10-14.  Waller’s poems were first published in 1645, when Waller was abroad.  But they had been known in manuscript.  They appear to have first come to the notice of Clarendon when Waller was introduced to the brilliant society of which Falkland was the centre.  If the introduction took place, as is probable, about 1635, this is the explanation of Clarendon’s ‘neere thirty yeeres of age’.  But some of his poems must have been written much earlier.  What is presumably his earliest piece, on the escape of Prince Charles from shipwreck at Santander on his return from Spain in 1623, was probably written shortly after the event it describes, though like other of his early pieces it shows, as Johnson pointed out, traces of revision.

l. 21. nurced in Parliaments.  He entered Parliament in 1621, at the age of sixteen, as member for Amersham.  See Poems, ed.  Drury, vol. i. p. xvii.

Page 180, l. 5.  The great instance of his wit is his reply to Charles II, when asked why his Congratulation ’To the King, upon his Majesty’s happy Return’ was inferior to his Panegyric ’Upon the Death of the Lord Protector’—­’Poets, Sir, succeed better in fiction than in truth’ (quoted from Menagiana in Fenton’s ‘Observations on Waller’s Poems’, and given by Johnson).  See Lives of the Poets, ed.  G.B.  Hill, vol. i, p. 271.

54.

Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and pernicious Errors to Church and State, In Mr. Hobbes’s Book, Entitled Leviathan.  By Edward Earl of Clarendon.  Oxford, 1676. (pp. 2-3.)