Toone who has followed the growth of the scientific movement in England toward the middle of the seventeenth century and the organization of the Royal Society in 1661, Edmund Waller's appearance as a charter member of the Society is no surprise. His association, while still a young man, with Lucius Cary and his philosophical friends at Great Tew placed him early in the main current of liberal thought in religion and politics which, interrupted by the outbreak of civil war, was turned aside into scientific channels. Though less intelligent and courageous than Cary and Edward Hyde, for example, Waller ran a parliamentary course which, with all his vacillation, was roughly parallel to theirs. Expelled from the House of Commons, fined and banished from England, though he was reconciled to Parliament, was made a commissioner of trade and wrote his “Panegyric to my Lord Protector” on Cromwell's death in 1658, he was taken as a sincere enough royalist when he greeted the King with a similar ode on his return two years later. That Waller was a royalist counted in his favor when it came to choosing members of the Society who were not particularly interested in science; for the scientific movement itself, carried on under the Commonwealth in informal meetings largely by mild parliamentarians and a few equally mild royalists who had managed to remain in England, became royalist in its temper so far as the honorary membership was concerned upon its incorporation as the Royal Society. At that time, problems of organization and administration were paramount, while science itself was far from technical, embracing the arts and touching language and literature themselves. The founders of the Society, therefore, solicited members from all “Religions, Countries, and Professions of Life” that they might not fall short of the “largeness of their own declarations.” That Waller was a poet in some favor at court, then, was reason enough in itself for his becoming a member of the Royal Society.