Adulation of people in power from Charles I and his Queen to Charles II and his Queen, or to Cromwell in "The Panegyric," was the common theme of Waller. As he is always tuneful and always vivacious he may be read with interest, whether he congratulates Prince Charles on his escape from shipwreck, or the King on his fortitude when he heard of the murder of Buckingham, or Cromwell on his victories, or Mary of Modena on a tea-party or Monmouth on the defeat of the Covenanters at Bothwell Bridge. His love verses to Sacharissa (Lady Dorothea Sidney) or to Amoret (Lady Sophia Murray?) are seldom tedious, and his "On a Girdle," and "Go, lovely Rose," and "Tell me, lovely loving pair" are among the imperishable flowers of the English anthology.
While he lived, and he lived to be 81, Waller always wrote well, nor was he less distinguished as an orator in Parliament, and a delightful companion. In the Short and Long Parliaments he appeared as a moderate member of the Parliamentary party, and opposed the abolition of Episcopacy. Revolution, not reform, was the winning card; and Waller slid into what was called Waller's Plot. He organized what may be called a scheme of constitutional resistance to the King's enemies, but with this coexisted, as usually happens, a more strenuous and violent conspiracy under Sir Nicholas Crispe.
The affair was detected on 31 May, 1643, Waller and his brother-in-law, Tompkyns, were arrested: Waller lost head and heart, confessed all that he knew, and more that he conjectured; lost honour, and kept his life at the ransom of a heavy fine, and exile (at Rouen). He made his peace with Cromwell, who had nothing to fear and something to gain from him, the famous panegyric of 1654. When Charles returned, Waller's congratulations were deemed by the King less good than his compliments to Cromwell. "Poets, Sir," answered Waller, "succeed better in fiction than in truth." The treacherous politician was forgiven on every side, the witty poet was welcome in Parliament and everywhere.
Waller's first wife was rich, his second was fertile. When at last his doctor pronounced his sentence of death, he quoted some lines of Virgil, and went home to die. John Evelyn had been "his worthy Friend": to no man were men more charitable than to Waller.
His "Battle of the Summer Islands" is mildly mock-heroic: the compliments which he lavished on other poets, as to Evelyn on his translation of Lucretius, outlive their works which he praised. Dryden esteemed him generously, and all the more because he was judiciously applauded by Sir George Mackenzie, the "bluidy Mackenzie" of the Covenanters.
With his songs Waller has one foot in the paradise of Lovelace and Suckling and Carew; as represented by his heroic couplets he almost enters the Augustan age. Waller well understood the transitoriness of poetic popularity, shifting with every change of manners, language and taste
Poets that lasting marble seek
Must carve in Latin or in Greek;
We write in sand, our language grows,
And, like the tide, our work o'er flows.
Chaucer his sense can only boast
The glory of his numbers lost.
Happily the glory of Chaucer's "numbers" has been recovered; nor is that of Waller's lost: his "sense" sometimes can only be appreciated by aid of some knowledge of history.
Marvell.
In a sense and as regards the better part of his poetry, Andrew Marvell may be reckoned among Cavalier poets. He had not, in full measure, the occasional but unique inspiration of Lovelace, but he is comparatively free from wanton conceits, and never falls into the abyss. He has, in addition to the charm of the Cavaliers at their best, a certain delicacy and reserve, and a sense of natural beauty and a rural felicity in which they do not abound. He has none of the stains of the tavern.