SOURCE: Chambers, A. B. “Waller and the Painter.” In Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire, pp. 85-107. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Chambers examines Waller's role in the evolution of painter poems.

On 3 June 1665, English forces commanded by James, Duke of York, defeated a Dutch navy under the admiralty of Jacob Wassenaer, Baron von Opdam, in a battle fought in the North Sea off the coast of Lowestoft, the easternmost extreme of England. That much is clear enough, and since almost everything thereafter was evidently mishandled, it probably is true that “the English victory off Lowestoft” was “the high point of this Second Dutch War.”¹ The first one (1652-54) had been ended by the Treaty of Westminster, some of the terms of which included Dutch reparations for actions dating from as far back as 1623, but this second one...