He was a
very poor poet and a purely mechanical versifier. He has lived mainly on
the credit of a single couplet,
"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed.
Lets in new light through chinks that Time hath made,"
in which the melody alone belongs to him, and the conceit, such as it is,
to Samuel Daniel, who said, long before, that the body's
"Walls, grown thin, permit the mind
To look out thorough and his frailty find."
Waller has made worse nonsense of it in the transfusion. It might seem
that Ben Jonson had a prophetic foreboding of him when he wrote: "Others
there are that have no composition at all, but a kind of tuning and
rhyming fall, in what they write. It runs and slides and only makes a
sound. Women's poets they are called, as you have women's tailors.
They write a verse as smooth, as soft, as cream
In which there is no torrent, nor scarce stream.
You may sound these wits and find the depth of them with your
middle-finger."[53] It seems to have been taken for granted by Waller, as
afterwards by Dryden, that our elder poets bestowed no thought upon their
verse. "Waller was smooth," but unhappily he was also flat, and his
importation of the French theory of the couplet as a kind of thought-coop
did nothing but mischief.
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