He was soon a favourite at that easy, merry court; his poetry caused his unconquerable duplicity to be forgotten--or, if not forgotten, looked on even complacently by courtiers who held all virtue to be hypocrisy. He managed to please everybody; though a water-drinker, he was the life of Bacchanalian parties. It is owing to Clarendon that the renegade was not made Provost of Eton--a post for which he had actually the audacity to ask. He thence became the friend and ally of George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, to whose age and time, rather than that of the subject of this memoir, one would gladly consign the apostate poet. One of his worst acts was to vote for the impeachment of Lord Clarendon; and here one would gladly end the record of the misdeeds of an able and accomplished man, distinguished almost as much for his eloquence as for his poetic productions. But Waller lived on; he was favoured by James II., who seems to have been cajoled by the flatteries which his royal brother had detected. Waller again in parliament, and now eighty years old, was permitted to speak jocularly with the monarch. One day he called Queen Elizabeth, in James’s presence, the “greatest woman in the world.” "I wonder," answered his Majesty, “you should think so; but it must be allowed she had a wise council.” "And when, sire," cried Waller, “did you ever hear of a fool choosing a wise one?” When it was known that the veteran courtier was going to marry his daughter to Dr. Birch, a clergyman, James sent a French gentleman to ask him how he could think of marrying his daughter to a falling church. “The King does me great honour,” was the reply, “to concern himself about my affairs; but I have lived long enough to observe that this falling church has got a trick of rising again.” He foresaw the coming crisis, but lived not to have an opportunity of writing odes to William III. and his Queen. He now composed “Divine Poems,” and began to think, at the age of eighty-three, that possibly this world, and the courts of the Charles’s and James’s, were not everything that there was to value in life. When he found himself sinking, he said, “Take me to Coleshill” (his native place); “I should be glad to die, like the stag, where I was roused.” He was, however, too near death to be removed; and he expired at Beaconsfield, in October, 1678, and thus escaped being the witness of another revolution. Such were some of the eminent contemporaries of George Villiers, in an age so rich in intellectual force as to constitute it, in that respect alone, one of the most remarkable periods of English history. But there were, among the _literati_ of that day, two men whose observations were peculiarly directed towards the career of Villiers--these were James Howell, the letter-writer, and Sir Henry Wotton.