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.