Madam,

’In this common joy at Penshurst[1], I know, none to whom complaints may come less unseasonable than to your ladyship, the loss of a bedfellow, being almost equal to that of a mistress, and therefore you ought, at least, to pardon, if you consent not to the imprecations of the deserted, which just Heaven no doubt will hear.  May my lady Dorothy, if we may yet call her so, suffer as much, and have the like passion for this young lord, whom she has preferred to the rest of mankind, as others have had for her; and may his love, before the year go about, make her taste of the first curse imposed upon womankind, the pains of becoming a mother.  May her first born be none of her own sex, nor so like her, but that he may resemble her lord, as much as herself.  May she, that always affected silence and retirement, have the house filled with the noise and number of her children, and hereafter of her grand-children; and then may she arrive at that great curse, so much declined by fair ladies, old age; may she live to be very old, and yet seem young; be told so by her glass, and have no aches to inform her of the truth; and when she shall appear to be mortal, may her lord not mourn for her, but go hand in hand with her to that place, where we are told there is neither marrying, nor giving in marriage, that being there divorced, we may all have an equal interest in her again! my revenge being immortal, I wish all this may befall her posterity to the world’s end, and afterwards!  To you, madam, I wish all good things, and that this loss may, in good time, be happily supplied, with a more constant bedfellow of the other sex.  Madam, I humbly kiss your hands, and beg pardon for this trouble, from

’Your ladyship’s
  ’most humble servant,
    ‘E.  Waller.’

He lived to converse with lady Sunderland when she was very old, but his imprecations relating to her glass did not succeed, for my lady knew she had the disease which nothing but death could cure; and in a conversation with Mr. Waller, and some other company at lady Wharton’s, she asked him in raillery, ’When, Mr. Waller, will you write such fine verses upon me again?’ ‘Oh Madam,’ said he, ’when your ladyship is as young again.’

In the year 1640, Mr. Waller was returned Burgess for Agmondesham, in which Parliament he opposed the court measures.  The writer of his life observes[2], ’that an intermission of Parliaments for 12 years disgusted the nation, and the House met in no good humour to give money.  It must be confessed, some late proceedings had raised such jealousies as would be sure to discover themselves, whenever the King should come to ask for a supply; and Mr. Waller was one of the first to condemn those measures.  A speech he made in the House upon this occasion, printed at the end of his poems, gives us some notion of his principles as to government.’  Indeed we cannot but confess he was a little too inconstant in them, and was not naturally so steady, as he was