⚫ on the 9th of April, upon consideration of a petition presented on behalf " of George Wither, now a prisoner in the Tower," it was ordered that his wife should be admitted to visit him, with a view of eliciting from him a "recantation and submission for the misdemeanour for which he was committed." But her efforts were slow in producing the required confession, and it was not until the 27th of July, 1663, that he was directed to be discharged, giving bond to the Lieutenant of the Tower for his good behaviour*. Mr. Campbell does not appear to have been aware of this release, for he improperly concludes that the poet died in prison.

The MS. pamphlet, for which he underwent this long and severe imprisonment, was addressed to the Lord Chancellor Clarendon; and it is impossible to account for the vindictive tyranny with which an offence of such slight comparative turpitude was visited. As the work was never printed, it could not be said to have done any injury.

Neither age nor sufferings had any effects upon the fluency of his pen. Soon after his discharge, perceiving the growing differences between this country and Holland, he sounded his Tuba Pacifica, or Trumpet of Peace; and when the public mind was agitated by the expectation of an engagement between the English and Dutch fleets, he "breathed out" some dull Sighs for the Pitchers; two pitchers being the emblems by which the rival nations were represented on the title-page.

Wither, whose narrative of the Plague in 1625 has been already noticed, was doomed to be a second time the spectator of its dreadful ravages. The pestilence

Aubrey says that he was imprisoned in the Tower about three quarters of a year; but this is a mistake, for his confinement lasted near sixteen months.

broke out in April, and in June he seems to have escaped its fury; for he observes in the Memorandum to London, p. 28, "God be praised, not so much as one hath been sick of any disease in my house since the plague began, nor is it, to my knowledge, near my habitation." But he afterwards suffered from the visitation. In the preamble to the Meditation upon the Lord's Prayer, he says, "During the great mortality yet continuing, and wherein God evidently visited his own household, my little family, consisting of three persons only, was visited, and, with my dear consort, long engaged in daily expectation of God's divine purpose concerning our persons; yet, with confidence, whether we were smitten or spared, lived, or died, it would be in mercy; for having nothing to make us in love with the world, we had placed our best hopes upon the world to come." His solitary seclusion was, in some measure, alleviated by the composition of the Meditations on the Lord's Prayer. "Providence," he tells us, "inclined my heart to contemplate the aforesaid prayer, when I seemed but illaccommodated to prosecute such an undertaking; for it was in the eleventh climacterical year of my life, and when, beside other bodily infirmities, I was frequently assaulted with such as were, perhaps, pestilential symptoms; and the keeping of two fires requiring more than my income seemed likely to maintain, I prosecuted my Meditations all the day, even in that room wherein my family and all visitants talked and despatched their affairs, yet was neither diverted nor discomposed thereby; but, by God's assistance, finished my undertaking within a short time after the recovery of my servant, whose life God spared."

The plague and the fire, which carried sorrow and

death into so many families, did their work upon our poet's friends. In the Fragmenta Prophetica, collected by his own hand a little before his death, he says that many of his friends being dead, "some impoverished, and the remainder, for the most part, so scattered since the late pestilence and fire, that nor he nor they then knew where to find each other, without much difficulty; he being wearied, and almost worn out, is constrained to prepare a resting-place for himself and his consort, which he hath prepared at a lonely habitation in his native country (where he neither had nor looked for much respect), and is resolved to retire there with as much speed as he can, to wait upon God's future dispensations during the remainder of his life." But, in the postscript to the same volume, we are told, what, indeed, few are ignorant of, that the uncertainty and changeableness of all temporal things make us accordingly mutable in our purposes, and that the author had been dissuaded from his retirement "to a solitary habitation in the place of his nativity" by the advice of his friends in London.

These were some of the last words traced by the poet's pen; the path had gradually been growing rougher and more painful, as he wound deeper into the vale of years; but we gather from the Paraphrase on the Ten Commandments, published by his daughter in 1588, that his aged hand continued almost to the last hour of his existence to labour in that cause, to which he gloried that he had devoted the morning of his days. He expired on the 2d of May, 1667, and was buried between the east door and south end of the church belonging to the Savoy Hospital in the Strand.

Wither had six children, only two of whom were

living in 1662*, both advantageously married; his daughter, when, through her father's misfortunes, she was left entirely portionless, having been "espoused into a loving family." This child alone survived him, and from her publication of his Divine Poems, we may conclude that his affectionate partner had preceded him to the tomb.

Of Wither's personal appearance, the portrait copied for this volume from a fine engraving by J. Payne †, prefixed to the Emblems, affords an interesting representation. We recognise in his manly features the "honest George Withers," of the celebrated Baxter. In the poem accompanying the portrait, he says of himself: For though my gracious Maker made me such, That where I love, beloved I am as much As I desire; yet form nor feature are Those ornaments in which I would appear

To future times,-though they were found in me
Far better than I can believe they be :-
Much less affect I that which each man knows
To be no more but counterfeits of those,
Wherein the painter's, or the graver's tool,
Befriends alike the wise man, and the fool;
And if they please, can give him by their art,
The fairest face, that had the falsest heart.

If, therefore, of my labours, or of me,

Ought shall remain, when I removed shall be,

• We learn this from his own epitaph, written by himself in 1664-5: Beside the issue of my brain,

I had six children, whereof twain

Did live, when we divided were.

Both marriages were performed during his imprisonment, and they "kept their weddings" in his plundered house, which was so destitute, that his wife had nothing to entertain them with, not "even a dish or spoon, but what a neighbour lent."-Three Meditations.

There is another by F. Delaram, and one in 8vo. by W. Holle, which has been engraved for the British Bibliographer.-Bliss's edition of Wood's Athen. Oron.

Let it be that wherein it may be view'd
My Maker's image was in me renewed;
And to declare a dutiful intent

To do the work I came for, ere I went,
That I to others may some pattern be,
Of doing well, as other men to me

Have been whilst I had life, and let my days
Be summed up to my Redeemer's praise-
So this be gained, I regard it not,

Though all that I am else be quite forgot.

His manners were, like his poetry, simple and unostentatious; the lines in which he ridiculed the fawning adulation of the age are quoted by Baxter :

When any bow'd to me with congees trim,
All I could do was stand and laugh at him:-
Biess me! I thought, what will this coxcomb do?
When I perceived one reaching at my shoe.

He was temperate in his habits; for life, he said, was preserved with a little matter, and that content might dwell with coarse cloth and bread and water. Like Milton, he indulged in the luxury of smoking; and many of his evenings in Newgate, when weary of numbering his steps, or telling the panes of glass *, werc solaced with "meditations over a pipe," not without a grateful acknowledgement of God's mercy in thus wrapping up "a blessing in a weed."

In his performance of the duties of private life he was irreproachable: while the sun rarely went down upon his wrath, his friendship lasted for years. The kindness of Westrow was always remembered with undiminished gratitude. His love to his wife and children was constant and unchanging; at a period when every

• Improvement of Imprisonment, p. 98.