Alive, in equal flames of love they burn'd,
And now together are to ashes turn'd.


The verses to Charles, on his return, were doubtless intended to
counterbalance the panegyric on Cromwell. If it has been thought
inferior to that with which it is naturally compared, the cause of
its deficience has been already remarked.

The remaining pieces it is not necessary to examine singly. They
must be supposed to have faults and beauties of the same kind with
the rest. The Sacred Poems, however, deserve particular regard;
they were the work of Waller's declining life, of those hours in
which he looked upon the fame and the folly of the time past with
the sentiments which his great predecessor Petrarch bequeathed to
posterity, upon his review of that love and poetry which have given
him immortality.

That natural jealousy which makes every man unwilling to allow much
excellence in another, always produces a disposition to believe that
the mind grows old with the body; and that he, whom we are now
forced to confess superior, is hastening daily to a level with
ourselves. By delighting to think this of the living, we learn to
think it of the dead; and Fenton, with all his kindness for Waller,
has the luck to mark the exact time when his genius passed the
zenith, which he places at his fifty-fifth year. This is to allot
the mind but a small portion. Intellectual decay is doubtless not
uncommon; but it seems not to be universal. Newton was in his
eighty-fifth year improving his chronology, a few days before his
death; and Waller appears not, in my opinion, to have lost at