WITHER. THESE last-mentioned writers Carew, Lovelace, Suckling. Denham, and Cleveland were all, as we have seen, cavaliers; but the cause of puritanism and the parliament had also its poets as well as that of love and loyalty. Of these the two most eminent were Marvel and Wither. Marvel's era, however, is rather after the Restoration. George Wither, who was born in 1588, covers nearly seventy years of the seventeenth century with his life, and not very far from sixty with his works: his first publication, his volume of satires entitled Abuses Stript and Whipt, having appeared in 1611, and some of his last pieces only a short time before his death in 1667. The entire number of his separate works, as they have been reckoned up by modern bibliographers, exceeds a hundred. Two songs or short poems of Wither's, inserted by Percy in his Reliques,1-the one beginning Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair? Be she fairer than the day, Or the flowery meads in May; If she be not so to me, What care I how fair she be? the other entitled The Stedfast Shepherd, an exquisitely graceful as well as high-thoughted carol, - first recalled attention to this forgotten writer; his high merits were a few years afterwards more fully illustrated by Mr. Octavius Gilchrist in the Gentleman's Magazine; and he was subsequently made more widely known by the specimens of him given by Ellis, - among the rest the passage of consummate beauty (previously quoted by Gilchrist) from his Shepherd's Hunting, published in 1615, while he was confined in the Marshalsea, in which, breaking out into what we may call a hymn or pæan of gratitude and affection, he recounts all that Poetry and his Muse still were and had ever been to him :— In my former days of bliss Her divine skill taught me this, — That from every thing I saw 1 Vol. iii. pp. 190 and 264. I could some invention draw, Than all Nature's beauties can Make this churlish place allow The dull loneness, the black shade, That these hanging vaults have made; The strange music of the waves Beating on these hollow caves; This black den, which rocks emboss, Overgrown with eldest moss; This my chamber of neglect, She hath taught me by her might Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee Though thou be to them a scorn That to nought but earth are born; Let my life no longer be Than I am in love with thee. Though our wise ones call thee madness, Let me never taste of gladness If I love not thy maddest fits More than all their greatest wits. And, though some, too seeming holy, Thou dost teach me to contemn What makes knaves and fools of them. One excellence for which all Wither's writings are eminent, his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His unaffected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it, — but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill. As a specimen of his clear and easy narrative style, we will transcribe a few passages from the Introduction to his Abuses Stript and Whipt, in which, by way of explaining the occasion of the work, he relates the history of his life to that date. After telling us that he had been well grounded at school in the Latin and Greek grammar, he proceeds to give an account of his first experience of Oxford: It is the spring of knowledge, that imparts It is the very nursery of wits. There once arrived, 'cause my wits were raw, The palaces and temples that were due To have my time there vain and idly spent, So, having said enough of their contents, He, with the Topics, opens, and descries These to unfold indeed he took much pain, But to my dull capacity in vain ; For all he spake was to as little pass As in old time unto the vulgar was The Romish rite, which, whether bad or good, As Coriat's horse was of his master's Greek, Contraries, and Subcontrarieties, Divisions, Subdivisions, and a crew Of terms and words such as I never knew, My shallow understanding so confounded, That I was gravelled like a ship that 's grounded; Till Cynthia six times lost her borrowed light. Stand prattling, these methought were pretty fools; And therefore, in some hope to profit so, That I like them at least might make a show, I reached my books that I had cast about, To see if I could pick his meaning out; And, which is strange, the things I had forgot, And till that very day remembered not Since first my tutor read them, those did then So that with which I had so much to do A week made easy, yea, and pleasing too. Afterwards he betook himself to court: But there I viewed another world, methought, That at once coming could have learned them French. Unless to talk with beggarmen in Paul's. All our school Latin would not serve to draw An instrument adjudged good in law. Nay, which is more, they would have taught me fain To go new-learn my English tongue again; As if there had been reason to suspect Our ancient-used Hampshire dialect. 66 Though still disappointed in his hopes of preferment, he continues to believe there is a happy time to come — " Which," he says in conclusion, when I have most need of comfort, shall |