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 courageously "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*. 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 Southamptont, 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 Sidney, and the authoress of a long and tedious romance, written in imitation of the Arcadia, entitled Urania‡. 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, it may be supposed to have occupied the same * Apology for Smectymnuus. + Braithwaite, in the Scholar's Medley, calls him "learning's best favourite." Shenstone was thankful that his name presented no facilities to the punster. Lady Wroth could not boast of the same immunity. In her case, 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 Underwoods to this Lady, and he also dedicated to her his exquisite comedy of the Alchemist. place in the earlier edition. The following attack upon an upright and honourable man cannot be justified. & slid be } plural, 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. 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 anything 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 prisont. Of the sufferings he endured there, Wither has left an affecting account in the Scholler's Purgatory. "All my apparent good intentions," 66 were so mistaken by the aggravation of some he says, * 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-Musa, 1644, p. 7, of Wither, "Tis known that once, within these thirty years, One of these must have been Ellesmere. Not, as Aubrey believed, to Newgate. 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-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. So that 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 their offerings 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. But it was not in his heart to be idle, or to yield to the depressing influence of his fortune; he seemed to experience, in its fullest meaning, the sentiment afterwards expressed by the accomplished Lovelace, when confined in the Gatehouse at Westminster; Stone walls do not a prison make, Minds innocent and quiet, take During his imprisonment he composed the Shepherd's Hunting, a pastoral poem of great beauty, and containing one passage in particular, the celebrated address to poetry, which will not be forgotten while the love of gentle thoughts shall endure amongst us. It is dedicated to those "virtuous friends" who visited him in the Marshalsea, and professes to be a small return for their numerous acts of kindness. The poem, he informs us, was no part of his study, but merely a recreation during his solitary hours, neither in his "conceit fitting, nor by him intended to be made common." Had Wither often written thus, it would, as Johnson remarked of the Elegy of Gray, have been useless either to criticise or to praise him. And though for her sake I am crost, Though my best hopes I have lost, And knew that she would make my trouble I would love and keep her too, Spite of all the world could do- With those sweets the spring-tide yields, And the lasses more excell Than the sweet-voiced Philomel; Though of all these pleasures past, Nothing now remains at last, But Remembrance (poor relief), That makes more than mends my grief; She's my mind's companion still, She doth tell me where to borrow Some things that may sweeten gladness In the very gall of sadness. The dull lowness, the black shade, She hath taught me by her might, Maugre, in spite of; Malgré, French-Nare's Glossary. |