It is customary to mention among English poets of the seventeenth century Sir Edward Sherburne, Thomas Stanley his kinsman, Alexander Browne, and Charles Cotton, whose birth and death dates range from 1618 to 1702--Sherburne's life occupied the whole space. All but Cotton, the latest born (1630), were of the Royalist party. Sherburne dealt most in translations and sacred verses; Browne in ditties of love, wine, and politics, with epistles and elegies; Stanley was a scholar--his amorous verses often approach excellence; Cotton celebrated Chloris with little inspiration, wrote angling songs, and was the friend of Izaak Walton, a fact that preserves his name in lavender. He wrote the part on fly-fishing (in which Walton was no expert) for a late edition of "The Compleat Angler," and (1681) celebrated in verse "The Wonders of the Peak," as he had sung the praises of his well-loved river, the Dove. His "Scarronides or Virgil Travestie," in the manner of Scarron gave offence to reverent admirers of the "Æneid". Waller. Edmund Waller, certainly the greatest wit of his time (for it would be sacrilege to speak of Milton as "a wit"), was born at Coleshill in Bucks, on 3 March, 1606. He was early left a rich orphan, was educated at Eton, and King's, Cambridge, entered Parliament at 18, and was familiar with the Court of James I. His first-known poem, on "The Escape of the Prince at Saint Andero," is in the same correct and elegant heroic verse as that of his later measures: Waller had at 18 command of the instrument to which Dryden fell heir. Possibly the poem, with some of his other loyal pieces of almost the same period, may have been improved by Waller in later days, but his ear was already as excellent as that of Davies in his "Nosce te Ipsum" or of Fairfax in his translation of Tasso. Waller had no taste for the venture-some irregular lines of his contemporaries, and seldom, like so many of them, drew amorous conceits from the depths of the fanciful science of the age. 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.