SIR CHARLES SEDLEY, the son of Sir John Sedley, of Aylesford, in Kent, was born about 1639. The first four-and-twenty years of his life were passed in the country. It was not until 1663 that he joined the court of Charles the Second, and became a man of wit and pleasure upon town. His singular advantages of personal address, and his inimitable conversational talent, speedily won for him the most unenvious admiration of his companions, as well as the highest favour from the king. A poem was never thought complete till Sedley had approved. Rochester, Wycherley, Butler, and Buckingham all solicited his judgment; and Charles, laughing, asked him whether nature had not given him a patent to be Apollo's viceroy. He afterwards wrote verses of his own. It is an excellent test of their merit that the author's judgment continued to be looked up to. Sedley's fortune, mean time, while his life thus passed carelessly and not unpleasantly away, passed away also. He had not lost his independence with his morals, in the sink of Charles the Second's court. He never solicited money from that prince, who was consequently, after the fashion of all mean natures, so much the less inclined to give it. In the early part of James the Second's reign, however, Sedley's struggles with poverty, and his abandoned tendency to pleasure, had both found an end. A member of the House of Commons, he was exerting himself strenuously against the encroachments of the monarchy, in fast league with the Whig patriots of the time. His services were justly held in repute, and he was an excellent as well as frequent speaker. He lived many years after this in a country retirement. At the commencement of the reign of Anne, having reached his ninetieth year, and outlived all the associates of his youth, except his own wit and humour, Sir Charles Sedley died. He had latterly, redeeming the licentiousness of his youth, commanded universal respect and esteem. "He was a man," says one of his friends, " of the first class of wit and gallantry. His friendship was courted by every body, and nobody went out of his company but pleased and improved. He was every thing that an English gentleman could be."

Sedley deserves a place in this collection, not less for his own sake than to mark the progress of poetical literature in its ascents and descendings. He gave expression to certain feelings which the wits of his day could not conceal from themselves, though they seldom confessed them in their verses, and has thus, while joining in other respects the general fashion of the age, supplied us with the means of better understanding it. He professed to be as gay as others; he fell easily in love, and as easily out of it; he inculcated feeling as a farce, yet as frequently betrayed that it was not so. Without the brilliancy of Rochester's genius, he had a tenderness which gave peculiar and inimitable grace to the loosest and most amorous solicitations. His poetry, therefore, generally carried with it its own antidote, for there was something in the soft tenderness of his style which bore off the noxious particles of his professed design. If he succeeded, we may suppose that his success had something of virtue in it. It is certain that, when in his poem to Phillis we read that delightful stanza

"Were I of all the woods the lord,

One berry from Thy hand,

More solid pleasure would afford,
Than all my large command!"*

it is no longer difficult to understand the Duke of Buckingham when he talks of "Sedley's witchcraft," or those lines by the Earl of Rochester, commencing-"Sedley has that prevailing gentle art." His art was truly gentle while it prevailed. In his poem of the Happy Pair, which is one of his longest and best performances, there are abundant evidences of truth and tenderness, and of that manly and delicate sense of honour which more particularly distinguished the close of the life of Sedley. Few pictures have exceeded that of the rustic bride and bridegroom as the storm arises"When clamorous storms, and pitchy tempests rise, Cheek clings to cheek, and swimming eyes to eyes! When jarring winds and dreadful thunders roar,

It serves to make them press and love the more "

Sedley was a very accomplished scholar, and made some capital translations; he wrote for the stage, also, but though his dramatic pieces have passages of great tenderness and undoubted wit, they are not generally successful.

LOVE still has something of the sea,
From whence his mother rose;
No time his slaves from doubt can free,
Nor give their thoughts repose:

They are becalm'd in clearest days,
And in rough weather tost;

They wither under cold delays,
Or are in tempests lost.

PP

One while they seem to touch the port,
Then straight into the main,
Some angry wind in cruel sport
The vessel drives again.

At first disdain and pride they fear,
Which if they chance to 'scape,
Rivals and falsehood soon appear
In a more dreadful shape.

By such degrees to joy they come,
And are so long withstood,
So slowly they receive the sum,
It hardly does them good.

"Tis cruel to prolong a pain,
And to defer a joy ;
Believe me, gentle Čelemene
Offends the winged boy.

An hundred thousand oaths your fears
Perhaps would not remove;

And if I gaz'd a thousand years
I could no deeper love.

THE INDIFFERENCE.

THANKS, fair Urania, to your scorn,
I now am free as I was born;
Of all the pain that I endur'd,
By your late coldness, I am cur'd.

In losing me, proud nymph, you lose
The humblest slave your beauty knows;
In losing you, I but throw down
A cruel tyrant from her throne.

My ranging love did never find

Such charms of person and of mind;
Y'ave beauty, wit, and all things know,
But where you should your love bestow.

I unawares my freedom gave,
And to those tyrants grew a slave;
Wou'd you have kept what you had won,
You should have more compassion shewn.

Love is a burthen, which two hearts,
When equally they bear their parts,
With pleasure carry; but no one,
Alas, can bear it long alone.

I'm not of those who court their pain,
And make an idol of disdain;

My hope in love does ne'er expire,
But it extinguishes desire.

Nor yet of those who ill receiv'd,
Wou'd have it otherwise believ'd;
And, where their love could not prevail,
Take the vain liberty to rail.

Whoe'er wou'd make his victor less,
Must his own weak defence confess,
And while her power he does defame,
He poorly doubles his own shame.

Even that malice does betray,
And speak concern another way;
And all such scorn in men is but
The smoke of fires ill put out.

He's still in torment, whom the rage
To detraction does engage;

In love indifference is sure

The only sign of perfect cure.

SONG.

PHILLIS, men say that all my vows
Are to thy fortune paid;
Alas, my heart he little knows

Who thinks my love a trade.

Were I, of all these woods, the lord,
One berry from thy hand
More real pleasure would afford,
Than all my large command.

My humble love has learnt to live,
On what the nicest maid,
Without a conscious blush, may give
Beneath the mirtle-shade.

JOHN WILMOT, Earl of Rochester, was born at Ditchley, near Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, on the 10th April, 1647. He inherited from his father little except the title, and such claims as were grounded upon his unshaken adherence to the unhappy fortunes of Charles the First. In 1659, when only twelve years old, he was entered at Wadham College, Oxford, having, even at that early age, afforded proofs of the vivacity of his wit and the vigour of his understanding. Two years afterwards he was, with several other young noblemen, made a master of arts by Lord Clarendon, then Chancellor of the University, and at once set out on his travels through France and Italy. In his eighteenth year he returned to England, possessing all the advantages that high rank, cultivated taste, refined manners, and a graceful person could bestow. Such recommendations were certain to make their way in that age of externals. The young Earl speedily rose in favour with Charles the Second; and his early predisposition for gaiety and intemperance was encouraged by the dissipated associates of a court, where wit occupied the places of all the virtues. We find, however, that Rochester did not continue long in this inglorious ease. His active and energetic mind wearied of repose; and, in the years 1665 and 1666, he established a reputation for courage and intrepidity in the sea service of his country. On his reappearance in London, he abandoned himself to an uninterrupted career of unredeemed debauchery; surpassing all the satellites of a dissolute court in grossness of conduct, insomuch that, as he himself declared to Bishop Burnet, "for five years together he was continually either drunk, or so much inflamed by inebriety, as at no interval to be master of himself." While in this state, he openly outraged all the laws of decency, playing the most extravagant pranks, engaging in the lowest amours, and avowing contempt for every moral and religious principle or obligation. Thus passed his life,-a continued course of dissipation and sensuality, "with intervals of study perhaps yet more criminal," until nature exacted the penalty of premature decay. He died on the 26th of July, 1680, having previously made some atonement to society by the declaration of a total change in his opinions, publicity to which was given by Bishop Burnet, in a little work printed after the death of the wretched subject of it. It has passed through many editions, and is recommended by Dr. Johnson as one "which the critic ought to read for its elegance, the philosopher for its arguments, and the saint for its piety." The poems of Rochester are, for the most part, in keeping with his life, gay, easy, and graceful, the produce of moments of excitement, but rarely of reflection or matured thought. They are such as give us glimpses of the natural vigour of his mind and the fertility of his imagination, and make us the more lament that his talents should have been enlisted on the side of vice. Few men might with greater certainty have calculated on "atchieving greatness;" but as his life was, to say the least, useless, so the productions of his pen are of small value, even if we put aside those that are, in the strongest sense, deleterious. The first edition of his poetry was issued as if shame attached to its publicity. It professed to have been printed at Antwerp, and doubtless contained many pieces of which he was not the author. Those that are known to be his relate chiefly to the common-place topics of artificial courtship, and are altogether without sentiment. They consist, for the most part, of a few lines, "such as one fit of resolution would produce."

Rochester presents to us a striking example of the wretchedness which dissipation never fails to bring. Good men loathed him, and he was despised even by his brother wits who trod in the same perilous path to notoriety. The character he had obtained for courage, he afterwards lost by meanly skulking out of broils,

"Pushing into a midnight fray

His brave companions, and then run away :"

and his bitter satire against one of them is scarcely a sufficient set-off to the biting couplet that was written in reply:

"Thou canst hurt no man's fame with thy ill word,

Thy pen is full as harmless as thy sword."

The life of Rochester, however, "points a moral,"-exhibits large talents rendered useless, or, rather, prejudicial, by dissipation,-and shows how baneful they may be rendered by vice, both to the possessor and to society.