Imágenes de página
PDF
ePub

of versifying the structure of the human body. The medical acquirements of the author must have been considerable. But in the midst of all the wearying minutiæ of physiological details, the reader is sometimes refreshed by touches of pure and natural description, worthy of Thomson or Burns. How exquisite is this picture of the lark :

The cheerful lark, mounting from early bed,

With sweet salutes awakes the drowsy light;
The earth she left, and up to heaven is fled-
There chants her Maker's praises out of sight.

Purple Island, c. 9, st. 2.

The apostrophe to the fallen empires of the world is sublimely conceived, and vigorously embodied:

Fond man, that looks on earth for happiness,
And here long seeks what here is never found!
For all our good we hold from heaven by lease,
With many forfeits and conditions bound;

Nor can we pay the fine and rentage due:
Though now but writ, and sealed, and given anew,
Yet daily we it break, then daily must renew.
Why shouldst thou here look for perpetual good,
At every loss 'gainst heaven's face repining?

Do but behold where glorious cities stood,
With gilded tops and silver turrets shining;

There now the hart, fearless of greyhound, feeds,
And loving pelican in safety breeds :

There screeching satyrs fill the people's empty stedes*.
Where is the Assyrian lion's golden hide,

That all the east once grasped in lordly paw?
Where that great Persian bear, whose swelling pride
The lion's self tore out with rav'nous jaw?

Or he who 'twixt a lion and a pard,

Through all the world with nimble pinions fared, And to his greedy whelps his conquered kingdoms shared. Hardly the place of such antiquity,

Or note of those great monarchies we find:

Only a fading verbal memory,

And empty name in writ is left behind:

* Places.

But when this second life and glory fades,
And sinks at length in time's obscurer shades,
A second fall succeeds, and double death invades.

That monstrous beast, which nursed in Tiber's fen,
Did all the world with hideous shape affray;
That filled with costly spoil his gaping den,
And trod down all the rest to dust and clay;

His battering horns, pulled out by civil hinds,
And iron teeth lie scattered on the sands;
Backed, bridled by a monk, with seven heads yoked stands.
And that black vulture, which with dreadful wing
O'ershadows half the earth, whose dismal sight
Frightened the muses from their native spring,
Already stoops, and flags with weary flight:

Who then shall look for happiness beneath?
Where each new day proclaims, chance, change, and
death,

And life itself's as fleet as is the air we breathe.

GEORGE WITHER.

IT has been the fashion among critics and readers of poetry to regard Wither only as a fanatical rhymer, and an intemperate puritan; yet, through the longest and brightest period of his life, he was neither. A puritan, indeed, in its true signification, he never was. It has been well observed, that no man is written down except by himself. Wither's political follies had, during his later years, been gradually erasing from the public remembrance the sweetness of his early poetry; and the wit and festivity accompanying the Restoration, tended still more to depress his fame. The accomplished Rochester and his companions held the popular mind in a more silken bondage. From the criticism and taste of that season, Wither could not hope either for favour or justice. The virulence of party feelings obscured the judgment even of the antiquary Wood; he saw in Locke a prating fellow, and in Milton a villanous incendiary. That Wood, in another place, rendered homage to the singer of Paradise Lost, only proves that the partisan was lost for a while in the admirer of that immortal composition. In days when Milton was only a blind old man, Wither had no right to complain that his poems were accounted mere scribbles, and the fancies of a conceited and confident mind." Heylin had long before called him an old puritan satirist; and Butler, in his Hudibras, made him the drunken companion of the voluminous Prynne, and the despicable Vicars. Philips, in the Theatrum Poetarum, added his mite of contumely; and Dryden, Swift, and Pope, did not forget

'

to follow his example. Swift, indeed, while sneering at Wither, manifested his taste and discernment by including Dryden in the censure.

In more recent times, critics have not been wanting, equally unkind, and equally uninformed, with respect to the object of their ridicule. Even the amiable and learned Bishop Percy had nothing better to say of the author of the Shepherd's Resolution, and other pastorals, indisputably among the finest of the kind in our language, than that he had "distinguished himself in youth by some pastoral pieces that were not inelegant." Ritson, while confessing that Wither's more juvenile productions would not discredit the first writer of the age, could not refrain from adding, that by "his long, dull, puritanical rhymes, he obtained the title of the English Bavius." This appellation has never been traced beyond Ritson, and considered the dull invention of his own pen. The preju

may

be

dice of Swift and of Ritson has found inheritors in our own day. Mr. D'Israeli, whose ingenuity and talent have met with the praise they deserve, was only able to discover that "this prosing satirist has, in some pastoral poetry, strange to say, opened the right vein*." Yet, this "prosing satirist" had written, in the morning of his days, poems, with which the juvenile efforts of Dryden, of Pope, or of Cowley, can bear no comparison; affording examples of versification singularly correct and musical, and breathing the manly fervour of pure and idiomatic English. Other names of equal influence might be added to this list; but it is pleasing to reflect, that amid all the clamour of petulant ignorance, some hands have been held up in the poet's favour. Dr. Southey, in one of his latest works, has not been ashamed to find in the neglected leaves of Wither, "a felicity of expression, a tenderness

*Quarrels of Authors, vol. 2, p. 254.

of feeling, and an elevation of mind*." A word of kindness, from one who has "built up the tombs" of so many of our elder poets in a beautiful criticism, ought to be adequately esteemed. Sir Egerton Brydges and Mr. Park have also exerted themselves in the poet's cause, and to their many and careful labours the writer of the following memoir has already acknowledged his obligations.

George Wither was born at Bentworth, near Alton, in Hampshire, and, according to Anthony Wood and Aubrey, on the 11th of June, 1588; but Dalrymple and Park, upon the authority of a copy of Abuses Stript and Whipt, in the possession of Mr. Herbert, have fixed the poet's birth in 1590. The register of baptisms at Bentworth affords no assistance, the earliest entry being in 1603. But a conclusive evidence in support of Wood and Aubrey is furnished by Wither himself, in a pamphlet entitled Salt upon Salt, where he says, in August, 1658,— When I began to know the world and men, I made records of what I found it then, Continuing ever since to take good heed How they stood still, went back, or did proceed; Till of my scale of time ascending heaven,

The round I stand in maketh ten times seven.

The "ten times seven" will carry his birth back to 1588.

George Wither, the poet's father, was descended from the Withers of Many downe, near Wotton St. Lawrence, in the county of Hants, where one of the family was recently residing.

He had three sons, George, James, and Anthony. The poet's mother was Ann Serle t.

*Memoir of Taylor, in Lives of Uneducated Poets.

+ An account of the pedigree of Wither's ancestors has been given by Sir Egerton Brydges, in the first volume of the Restituta, from the visitation book of Hampshire, in 1634. The family, which originally came from Lancashire, had been seated in Hampshire many years before the birth of the poet. In 1810, the representative of another branch of

« AnteriorContinuar »