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honoured with frequent invitations to his own table, and did not hesitate to soothe by personal visits, must have possessed no little influence. It speaks powerfully for his honesty, that he subsequently forfeited the favour of Cromwell.

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His religious feelings are hardly less difficult accurately to define than his political sentiments. He was, almost up to the breaking out of the civil war, a follower of the established church, and although solicited by the seductive offers of numerous Sectaries, he still continued to hold fast the faith of his fathers. But Republicanism and Episcopacy could not subsist together; yet he might be said to have forsaken the outward forms of our church, rather than its ordinances. When questioned as to his belief, he answered that he called himself a Catholic Christian, a title not affected out of any singularity, but "by way of distinction" only. "I separate myself," he says, from no church adhering to the foundations of Christianity; I waive the confining my belief or practice to any one national or congregational society of Christians, not out of a factious inclination or petulant disesteem of any; but having a desire to be instrumental in uniting men, dissenting in judgment, both unto God and each other in love, I conceive that endeavour would be suspected of partiality, and not so effectually prosecuted, if I made myself party with any one fraternity more than another. True faith cannot be evidenced without good works, which being imperfect in the best of men, we have no such certain mark whereby unfeigned disciples may be known, as by their being loving to each other and charitably affected toward all men; yea, although they are our personal enemies*."

We may admire the piety of this passage without con

* An Answer to some Objections, reprinted 1666.

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fessing the justness of the reasoning; we discern in the poet's mild and Christian declaration, none of the gloom of the ascetic, or the harshness of the intolerant bigot. To be of no church, it has been excellently observed, is dangerous; all men cannot, like Milton, preserve a religion of the heart;" and even in his case we find more to regret than to admire. Wither has left abundant testimony to prove the sincerity of his religious professions. If he did not endure his misfortunes in silence, at least he braved them with fortitude; if, amid the overwhelming perils of the country, he too often sat down on his own "little bundle of thorns*," it may be urged in his behalf, that he suffered much and long. In the resolution with which he fulfilled what he considered the commission intrusted to him from above, we trace something of primitive singleness of heart. For nearly half a century he was a "watchman for the nation," unceasingly warning it of its vices and crimes. Through the dangers of the pestilence, and all the changes of Government, he pursued the same course; often, indeed, drawn aside by the importunities and weaknesses of heart, to whose charming no human ear can be utterly deaf, but always returning, after a little while, to his labours. Though the storm of adversity might beat upon his spirits, it could not subdue them; he walked with untired feet,

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at one time threatened with "loss of limb and tortures," at another, glad to escape from his enemies only with "life and raiment." He was imprisoned in the Marshalsea, Newgate, and the Tower, frequently without any means of procuring the common necessaries of life. If he murmured, he did not faint; in the midst of all his

* Jeremy Taylor.

persecutions he derived peace and consolation from a sincere reliance on the mercy of Heaven, often exclaiming that he was "excellently sad," and that God infused such happiness into his heart, that grief became to him "Comfort's mother." Under one of his heaviest calamities he could exclaim,

But Lord, though in the dark

And in contempt thy servant lies,

On me there falls a spark

Öf loving-kindness from thine eyes.

While lauding his virtues, I am far from being blind to his errors. Had Wither remembered the sacred command, Do not evil that good may come, many of his follies would not have been committed. He would then have been more temperate in his satire, more steadfast in his politics, and more decided in his religion. The best apology which can now be offered, is contained in his own affecting words. "Be it considered that some of these books were composed in his unripe age; some when wiser men than he erred; and that there is in all of them somewhat savouring of a natural spirit, and somewhat dictated by a better spirit than his own."

Upon the merits of his poetry it is unnecessary to dilate. His early compositions were not, perhaps, sufficiently popular to operate very powerfully on the public taste, but in the Shepherd's Hunting, the Mistress of Philarete, and the Shepherd's Pipe, the correctness of Denham and Waller was united to a natural grace and melody of style, to which they have not an equal claim. His touches of rural simplicity have never been surpassed; in his hand the pastoral reed seemed not to have forgotten the lip of Spenser.

As a sacred poet, he is entitled to a distinguished place among his contemporaries. If he does not awe the soul with the majesty of Milton, or crush it with the iron

energy of Quarles, or force the tears of rapture into our eyes with the pathos of Crashaw, yet his words come home to every bosom, and no man ever poured the balm of holy truth into a wounded heart with a more affectionate hand. He had been taught sympathy in a good school, the school of adversity. He was in his own day, we are told, a favourite with young readers; and the purity and love of virtue manifested in all he wrote, rendered him a meet companion. The elements of his art were few; his verses contain no skilful combinations of imagery, or metaphors elaborated with a painful ingenuity; he showed us that the tree of poetry never flourishes with greener beauty, than when deeply rooted in the common joys and sorrows of humanity. The Muse never appeared to him in so beautiful a form, or with so endearing a salutation, as when she brightened the chamber of the Marshalsea with her presence; but though, in after-times, he devoted his pen to pursuits which he hoped would prove more beneficial to the world, the fervour and unaffectedness of his youthful strains were not entirely destroyed. While the wit and fancy of Cowley were being chilled into cold and glittering eccentricities; while Donne was torturing his erudition into fantastic images, and Jonson was encumbering his imagination with the treasures of a fargathered learning, Wither remained faithful to the early models of nature and truth. In the Halleluiah, published when he was fifty-three years old, the sincerity and earnestness of his heart are still fresh and vigorous.

Among his poetical friends, in addition to those already mentioned, were the well-known Michael Drayton; Thomas Cranley, whom he styled his brother, the writer of a poem called Amanda; Hayman, the author of the Quodlibets*;

*Hayman was for some time Governor of the Plantations in Newfoundland, where he composed the greater part of his verses. He was, also, a friend of Vicars, who honoured him with an Acrostic Sonnet.

and Christopher Brooke, a companion of Browne, and a member of Lincoln's Inn, where he became the "chamberfellow" of Donne, with whom he was imprisoned, on account of that poet's imprudent marriage. Wither also contributed verses to Carter's most true and exact Relation of the Expedition of Kent, Essex, and Colchester, in 1648; to Butler's Feminine Monarchie, or the History of Bees, in 1623*; and a Latin poem, signed G. W., before Payne Fisher's Marston Moor, may belong to him. Fisher was the unsparing magnifier of Cromwell's actions, and appears to have subsisted upon the proceeds of his flattery. Pepys, who knew him, says in his Diary, 26th July, 1660, that the "poet Fisher" wished on that day to borrow "a piece," and that he sent him "half a piece.” In Pinkerton's preface to Ancient Scottish Songs, allusion is made to some compositions by Wither among the Bannatyne MSS., but it would seem from the appendix, as Park has remarked, that he can only claim a Scottish version of one of his celebrated songs.

It may not be uninteresting to the reader of the preceding memoir, to know that the poet's name is still in existence in his native place. When the writer was at Bentworth in the summer of 1833, he was surprised, on ascending the steep path leading to the church, to find the name of Withers upon the sign-board of a little publichouse by the road-side. On inquiry he was informed that this individual came from the neighbourhood of Farnham, in Surrey: and from the long residence of our poet in that part of the country, it is not improbable that the host of

* Some of these lines are not inelegant :

Great God Almighty; in thy pretty bees
Mine eye (as written in small letters) sees
An abstract of this wisdom, power, and love,
Which is imprinted in the heavens above,
In larger volumes, for their eyes to see,
That in such little prints behold not Thee.

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