Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young; thenceforth, for many years--a gay and coquettish widower--he pursued the Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this: “Go, lovely Rose, Tell her, that wastes her time and me, That now she knows When I resemble her to thee How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that’s young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts where no men abide, Thou must have, uncommended, died.” But neither this, nor a hundred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married--like a wise woman--somebody else. And he? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever--sang till he was over eighty. _John Milton._ And now we come to a poet of a larger build--a weightier music--and of a more indomitable spirit; a poet who wooed the world with his songs; and the world has never said him “Nay.” I mean John Milton.[57] He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth. A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson’s recently completed _Life and Times of Milton_, which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long--six fat volumes of big octavo--in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, floats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of historic soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608. In Cheapside--it may be well to recall--stood the Mermaid Tavern; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Milton’s father lived. And on that corner--who knows?--the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern-ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger--all these being comfortably inclined to taverns.