of this play, that it is the work of a man. not attentive to decency, nor zealous for virtue; but of one who conceived forcibly, and drew originally, by confulting nature in his own breast. Together with those plays he wrote the poems which are in the late collection, and tranflated from the French the Hiftory of the Triumvirate. All this was performed before he was thirty-four years old; for he died April 14, 1685, in a manner which I am unwilling to mention. Having been compelled by his neceffities to contract debts, and hunted, as is fuppofed, by the terriers of the law, he retired to a publick houfe on Tower-hill, where he died of want; or, as it is related by one of his biographers, by fwallowing, after a long faft, a piece of bread which charity had fupplied. He went out, as is reported, almost naked, in the rage of hunger, and finding a gentleman in a neighbouring coffee-house, afked him for a fhilling. The gentleman gave him a guinea; and Otway going away bought a roll, and was choaked with the firft mouthful. 23 mouthful. All this, I hope, is not true; but that indigence, and its concomitants, forrow and defpondency, brought him to the grave, has never been denied. Of the poems which the late collection admits, the longest is the Poet's Complaint of his Mufe, part of which I do not understand; and in that which is lefs obfcure I find little to commend. The language is often grofs, and the numbers are harsh. Otway had not much cultivated verfification, nor much replenished his mind with general knowledge. His principal power was in moving the pasfions, to which Dryden in his latter years left an illustrious teftimony, He appears, by fome of his verses, to have been a zealous royalist: and had what was in those times the common reward of loyalty; he lived and died neglected. WALLER. WALL E R. EDMUND WALLER was born on the third of March, 1605, at Colfhill in Hertfordshire. His father was Robert Waller, Efquire, of Agmondesham in Buckinghamshire, whofe family was originally branch of the Kentifh Wallers; and his mother was the daughter of John Hampden, of Hampden in the fame county, and fifter to Hampden, the zealot of rebellion. His father died while he was yet an infant, but left him an yearly income of three thoufand five hundred pounds; which, rating together the value of money and the cuf toms of life, we may reckon more than equivalent to ten thousand at the present time. |