appointed expectations. In the dedication, he alludes to the imagination of some preferment, and confesses, that being unable to procure any employment, he had applied himself to watching the vices of the times.

He refers, mysteriously, to the destruction of his prospects, in the Shepherd's Hunting, where, after detailing, in an allegory, the ravages made by the wild beasts of the Metropolis among the flocks of innocent shepherds, he says,

Yea, I among the rest did fare as bad,

Or rather worse, for the best ewes* I had,

Whose breed should be my means of hope and gain,
Were in one evening by these monsters slain,
Which mischief I resolved to repay,

Or else grow desperate, and hunt all away.
For in a fury (such as you shall see
Huntsmen in missing of their sport will be)
I vow'd a monster should not lurk about,
In all this province but I'd find him out.
And thereupon, without respect or care,
How, lame, how full, or how unfit they were,
In haste unkennell'd all my roaring crew,
Who were as mad as if my mind they knew.

This roaring crew consisted of his Satyrs, which Wither followed in full cry through

Hamlets, tithings, parishes, and boroughs,
Through kitchen, parlour, hall and chamber too-
And as they pass'd the City, and the Court,

My Prince look'd out end deign'd to view the sport.

Far, however, from lamenting his ill-success, Wither rejoiced that God, "by dashing his hopes," had called him to himself again. Considered as the work of a young man, who came to the task with no preparation

• Meaning his hopes.

of books or study, Abuses Whipt and Stript merits our approbation *. In the Address to the Reader, we are cautioned not to look "for Spenser's or Daniel's wellcomposed numbers, or the deep conceits of now flourishing Jonson." He purposely avoided speaking in "dark parables," and rejected as useless, all "poetical additions and feigned allegories."

Warton says that Wither's poem is characterized by a vein of severity unseasoned by wit; but I have yet to learn that wit, in the common acceptation of the word, is necessary to the formation of a satirist. We find little of it in Juvenal, and still less in Dr. Johnson's noble imitation of his manner. The vices and crimes of men are not to be cured or restrained by laughing at them. The light arrows of mirthful irony and humour make no impression on their coat of steel; it is only by the "mailed and resolved hand" of virtuous indignation that their coverings can be rent away, and their natural deformity and loathsomeness exposed. If Wither had not the hand to do this, he had at least the desire, and he came up to Milton's idea of the duties of a satirist, by striking high, and adventuring dangerously "at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons ;" and he afforded an example, in his own person, that if a satire was not always "born out of a Tragedy," it frequently terminated in one t.

Appended to the Satire are several epigrams addressed to various individuals, and among others to Lord Ridgeway, whom Wither commemorates as the first that "graced and gratified his Muse." Henry, Earl of

When he this book composed, it was more
Than he had read in twice twelve months before.
Introduct. to Abuses, &c.

↑ Apology for Smectyinnus.

Southampton*, the patron of Shakspeare, and one of the founders of Virginia; William, Earl of Pembroke, of whose almost universal generosity to poets I shall have another opportunity of speaking; and Lady Mary Wroth, the niece of Sir Philip Sydney, and the authoress of a long and tedious romance, in imitation of the Arcadia, entitled Uraniat.

At the end of Abuses, &c., is a poem called the Scourge, in which Wither appears to have gratified his malignity at the expense of his honesty. Wood, who had never seen the Scourge, speaks of it as a separate publication, but it forms a postscript to the edition of Abuses Whipt and Stript, in 1615, and from the terms in which the Author refers to it, may be supposed to have occupied the same place in the earlier edition. The following attack upon an upright and honourable man cannot be justified.

And prithee tell the B. Chancellor,

That thou art sent to be his counsellor,
And tell him if he mean not to be stript,
And like a school-boy once again be whipt,
His worship would not so bad minded be,
As to pervert judgment for a scurvy fee.

The individual here alluded to must have been Lord Ellesmere, a man whose excellence of heart and purity of mind obtained the suffrages of his contemporaries.

• Braithwaite, in the Scholar's Medley, calls him “learning's best avourite."

Shenstone was thankful that his name presented no facilities to the unster. Lady Wroth could not boast of the same immunity. In her ase, however, the ingenuity of flattery alone was evinced. Davies, of Hereford, in his Twenty-nine Epigrams, addressed to contemporary poets, has one inscribed to the all-worthily commended Lady Mary Wroth," whose name, he says, in the abstract, is not Wroth, but Worth. Ben Jonson inscribed two of his Epigrams, and a Sonnet in the Undergoods to this Lady, and he also dedicated to her his exquisite comedy of he Alchemist.

He died in 1616, and James received the seals with his own hand from the expiring Chancellor. Hacket says of him, in the Life of Archbishop Williams, that he never did, spoke, or thought any thing undeserving of praise. It is a singular fact, that Lord Bacon and Bishop Williams, who both partook of his generous patronage, should have succeeded him in his high office. The poet Donne, who, on his return from Spain, had become Secretary to Lord Ellesmere, was deprived of the benefit of the connexion by his secret marriage with the daughter of Sir George More*.

The Satire produced, it is to be feared, no salutary effects upon the public morals, but it sent the imprudent author to the Marshalsea prison t. Of the sufferings he endured there, Wither has left an affecting account in the Scholler's Purgatory. "All my apparent good intentions," he says, 66 were so mistaken by the aggravation of some ill affected towards my endeavours, that I was shut up from the society of mankind, and, as one unworthy the compassion vouchsafed to thieves and murderers, was neither permitted the use of my pen, the access or sight of acquaintance, the allowances usually afforded other close prisoners, nor means to send for necessaries befitting my present condition: by which means I was for many days compelled to feed on nothing but the coarsest bread, and sometimes locked up four

• Ben Jonson, who, as Mr. Gifford has observed, knew Lord Ellesmere, and judged him well, has in more than one place, recorded his worth; he describes him, in the Discoveries, as "a grave and great orator, best when he was provoked;" and he also eulogized the purity of the Chancellor's judgments in one of the most beautiful of his epigrams, and in the Underwoods, made him the theme of his praise. Taylor says, in the Aqua-Musæ, 1644, p. 7, of Wither,

'Tis known that once, within these thirty years,

Thou wert in jail for slandering some peers.

One of these must have been Ellesmere.

↑ Not, as Aubrey believed, to Newgate.

and-twenty hours together, without so much as a drop of water to cool my tongue: and being at the same time in one of the greatest extremities of sickness that was ever inflicted upon my body, the help both of physician and apothecary was uncivilly denied me.

if God had not, by resolutions of the mind which he infused into me, extraordinarily enabled me to wrestle with those and such other afflictions as I was then exercised with all, I had been dangerously and lastingly overcome. But of these usages," he adds, "I complain not; He that made me, made me strong enough to despise them."

Wither's account of his sufferings may have been somewhat exaggerated; for Taylor, the Water-poet, who knew him well, informs us that multitudes of people came to him "in pilgrimage during his imprisonment," and provided him with every necessary. But though multitudes might have made a pilgrimage to the Marshalsea, it does not follow that either they or the provisions were admitted to the prisoner. Indeed the banishment of his friends, and the "exclusion from the Sacred Rites," were the constant subjects of the poet's lamentation.

It was not in the heart of Wither to be idle, or to yield to the depressing influence of his fortune; he seemed to experience, in its truest meaning, the sentiment afterwards expressed by the accomplished Lovelace, when confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster;

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage;

Minds innocent and quiet, take

That for a hermitage.

During his imprisonment he composed the Shepherd's