P. 62, No. lxviii.--Waller’s fame has sadly, but not undeservedly, declined since the time when it used to be taken for granted that he had virtually invented English poetry, or one might almost say, the English language; since an editor of his poems (1690) could write that his was ‘a name that carries everything in it that is either great or graceful in poetry. He was indeed the parent of English verse, and the first that showed us our tongue had beauty and numbers in it. The tongue came into his hands like a rough diamond; he polished it first, and to that degree that all artists since him have admired the workmanship without pretending to mend it.’ Compare the twenty-two lines devoted to him in Addison’s _Account of the greatest English Poets_, which includes Congreve, but not Shakespeare! For myself, I confess that I did not find it very easy to select from the whole range of his poems one which I much cared to quote. He appears in this to have had in his eye the graceful epigram of Rufinus beginning, Πἑμπω σοι, Ρυδὁκλεια, τὁδε στἑφος, and ending with these lines, ταῦτα στεψαμένη, λῆξον μεγδλαυχος ἐοῦσα, ἀνθεις καἰ λήγεις καἰ σὐ καἰ ό στέφανος. P. 63, No. lxx.--Castara, to whom these beautiful lines are addressed, was a daughter of William Herbert, first Lord Percy, and either was already, or afterwards became, the wife of the poet. There are no purer and few more graceful records of a noble attachment than that which is contained in the poems to which Habington has given the name of the lady of his happy love. Phillips, writing in 1675, says, ‘His poems are now almost forgotten.’ How little they deserved this, how finished at times his versification was, lines such as the following--they are the first stanza of a poem for which I could not find room--will abundantly prove. It is headed, _Against them who lay Unchastity to the sex of Women_. ‘They meet with but unwholesome springs, And summers which infectious are, They hear but when the mermaid sings, And only see the falling star, Who ever dare Affirm no woman chaste and fair.’ P. 76, No. lxxviii.--Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all: ‘Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.’ They are so far beyond all doubt the greatest in the language that it is a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow is that ‘three of them are not bad;’ and he and Hannah More once set themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains an illustration lively enough to be worth quoting: ‘Why, Madam,’ he said, ‘Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherry-stones.’