Life & Wisdom Quote by Edmund Waller

Waller lands the insult softly, like a courtier sliding a dagger between compliments. The line pretends to offer practical advice about popularity, then reveals its real target: “the vulgar” as both audience and contaminant. If you want your work to “take,” to catch and spread among the many, you must be “of vulgar mould” yourself. The phrasing is doing double duty. “Take” is commercial and almost bodily, suggesting infection; “mould” makes vulgarity a material you’re cast in, not a habit you can shrug off. Taste, in this worldview, isn’t learned so much as bred.

The intent is defensive and aristocratic: Waller is policing the border between elite art and mass approval, implying that wide appeal is evidence against refinement. It’s a move that flatters a select audience by letting them feel outnumbered yet superior, a classic early-modern pose in a culture where patronage mattered and reputation traveled through courts, salons, and factional politics. Waller lived through civil war, regicide, restoration; he watched public moods turn lethal. Skepticism about “the vulgar” isn’t just snobbery but a survival instinct in a volatile public sphere.

The subtext is anxious: what if the crowd is becoming the real patron? As print expands and taste becomes less tethered to courtly gatekeepers, the poet’s status feels newly negotiable. Waller turns that negotiation into moral certainty: to court the many is to become them. It’s a neat piece of self-credentialing, and a reminder that “popular” has long been an accusation masquerading as a metric.