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.)
It is a misfortune that Clarendon did not write a character of Hobbes, and, more than this, that there is no character of Hobbes by any one which corresponds in kind to the other characters in this collection. But in answering the Leviathan, Clarendon thought it well to state by way of introduction that he was on friendly terms with the author, and the passage here quoted from his account of their relations is in effect a character. He condemned Hobbes's political theories; 'Yet I do hope', he says, 'nothing hath fallen from my Pen, which implies the least undervaluing of Mr. Hobbes his Person, or his Parts.'
Page 181, l. 21. ha's, a common spelling at this time and earlier, on the false assumption that has was a contraction of haves.
55.