A POET IN PRISON

THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING: _being Certain Eglogues written during the
time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther,
Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are to
be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre_. 1615.


If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it was
George Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable
oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in
cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be
recollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne
persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed
really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy.
Swift, in _The Battle of the Books_, brings in this poet as the
meanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army. Pope
speaks of him with the utmost freedom as "wretched Withers." It is
true that he lived too long and wrote too much--a great deal too
much. Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than one hundred of his
publications, and some of them are wonderfully unattractive. I should
not like to be shut up on a rainy day with his _Salt upon Salt_, which
seems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn to blow upon his _Tuba
Pacifica_, although it was "disposed of rather for love than money."
The truth is that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was an
upright, honest, and patriotic man who unhappily developed into a
scold, and got into the bad habit of pouring out "precautions,"
"cautional expressions," "prophetic phrensies," "epistles at random,"