sisting 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 ill-accommodated 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, 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 it wound deeper into the vale of years; but we gather from the Paraphrase on the Ten Commandments, published by his daughter in 1688, 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 2nd 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. Paynet, prefixed

* 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. Oxon.

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 features 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,
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:
Bless 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*, were solaced with "meditations over a pipe," not without a grateful acknowledgment 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 man's hand was against his neighbour, it is delightful to recollect that one family was united in the bond of Christian amity; and that while the night without was dark and tempestuous, the humble charities of the poet's fire-side were preserved inviolate.

If we pass from his private to his public character, the contemplation is not so pleasing. As a politician he was weak and inconsistent, a reed shaken by every wind. Echard called him a dangerous incendiary, and said that he was capable of doing a great deal of mischief. Yet he never became the fosterer of crime, or the apologist of tyranny. He lived, he tells us, under eleven different governments,-Elizabeth, James, Charles the First, the King and Parliament together, the Parliament alone, the Army, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, a Council of State, the Parliament again, and Charles the Second. In his youth, and for many years after, we have seen him the admirer of the Monarchy, and if he forsook the cause of royalty, it should not be forgotten that he did not long remain with the Parliament; if he became the eulogist of Cromwell, he at the same time spoke to him boldly of his Unlike contemporary rhymers, his flattery seldom

errors.

degenerated into adulation-he always mixed wormwood with the wine. The man who could indignantly return to the Protector, when in the zenith of his power, the key of his private closet at Whitehall, given as a mark of peculiar favour, was no common individual. His numerous pamphlets, with few exceptions, cannot be numbered among the controversial fruits of the age; they are usually devoted to the expression of his own wrongs, and more frequently deserve the name of Ribble-Rabblements, bestowed on them by himself, than any more honourable appellation. They have none of the menace and defiance, the "trample and spurn" of the polemical Milton. By some he was called a puritan, by others a presbyterian, but his own words show that he was neither. "I am not," he said, "for or against the Presbyterians, Independents, King, Parliament, members, or people, more or less than in my judgment may conduct to the wrong or right way-from or toward the truth of God." Of the royal power he desired a reformation, not an extirpation*; and he drew up a petition against the execution of Charles the First, but could not find any member bold enough to present it.

In his earlier days he had been noticed by the High Church party; and in later times, the leaders of the Republican administration thought him worth their regard. He says that he was known "to the greatest number of the most considerable persons in the nation," and had familiarity with many of them, not "without some appearance of good respect." In the list of his political acquaintance we have found Oliver Cromwell, Lord Essex, Sir Gilbert Pickering, &c.; and he whom the Protector

*Furor Poeticus, p. 33, and again in the Epistle at Randome, p. 15, -"For I never was absolutely for or against a King, or Commonwealth, with or without a single person, but according as God's extraordinary dispensations, the present necessities, the law of common justice, and the people's assent in Parliament, made it expedient or not expedient."