ABSTRACT
Waller (1606-87), whose poems were immensely popular between the 1640s and the mid-eighteenth century, addressed in verse as ‘Sacharissa’ (and sought in marriage) Lady Dorothy Sidney, subsequently Countess of Sunderland, who was Sir Philip Sidney’s great-niece. In ‘At Penshurst’ (‘Had Dorothea [Sacharissa in the 1664 edition] liv’d…’), there is a reference to ‘yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark /Of noble Sidney’s birth’ (1645 edn, p. 41).
