Vulgar words in Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (Page 1)
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 194 ~ ~ ~
And certainly few men had a better opportunity than Waller of seeing in private and in undress, and with an eye in which native sagacity was sharpened by prejudices, partly for, partly against, the Man of that century--a man in whom we recognise a union of Roman, Hebrew, and English qualities--the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age--in purpose and in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon; the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far above all the aristocracy, and all the royalty, and all the literature of his period; who found his one great faculty--inflamed and consecrated commonsense--to be more than equal to the subleties, and brilliancies, and wit, and eloquence, and taste, and genius, of his thousand opponents--whose crown was a branch of English oak, his sceptre a strong sapling of the same, his throne a mound of turf--who economised matters by being at once king and king's jester, and whose mere _clenched fist_, held up at home or across the waters, saved millions of money, awed despots, encouraged freedom in every part of the world, and had nearly established a pure form of Christianity over Great Britain--who gave his country a model of excellence as a man, and as a ruler, simple, severe, ruggedly picturesque, and stupendously original, and solitary as one of the primitive rocks--whose eloquence was uneven and piercing as the forked lightning, which is never so terrible as when it falls to pieces --and highest praise of all, whose deeds and character were so great in their sublime simplicity, that the poet, who afterwards sung the hierarchies of heaven, and the anarchies of hell, was fain to sit a humble secretary, recording the thoughts and actions of Cromwell, and felt afterwards that he had been as nobly employed when defending his grand defiance of evil and arbitrary power, as when he did "Assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to man."
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'Twas not revenge for griev'd Apollo's wrong, 15 Those ass's ears on Midas' temples hung, But fond repentance of his happy wish, Because his meat grew metal like his dish.
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1 Toll, toll, Gentle bell, for the soul Of the pure ones in Pole, Which are damn'd in our scroll.
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13 But fate Brought the letter too late, 'Twas of too old a date To relieve their damn'd state.
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But the rain made an ass Of tilt and canvas, And the snow, which you know is a melter.