"personal contributions to the national humiliation," "passages,"
"raptures," and "allarums," until he really became the greatest bore
in Christendom. It was Charles Lamb who swept away this whole tedious
structure of Wither's later writings and showed us what a lovely poet
he was in his youth.

When the book before us was printed, George Wither was aged
twenty-seven. He had just stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea
Prison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest against
having been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again.
Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of the
Marshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists. The family of the
Dorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalsea
of Wither's time, although that also lay across the water in
Southwark. It is said that the prison was used for the confinement of
persons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about the Court. Wither,
as we shall see, makes a great parade of telling us why he was
imprisoned; but his language is obscure. Perhaps he was afraid to be
explicit. In 1613 he had published a little volume of satires, called
_Abuses stript and whipt_. This had been very popular, running into
six or seven editions within a short time, and some one in office, no
doubt, had fitted on the fool's cap. Five years later the poor poet
would have had a chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, as
a "debauched person"; as it was, the Marshalsea seems to have been
tolerably unpleasant. We gather, however, that he enjoyed some
alleviations. He could say, like Leigh Hunt, "the visits of my friends
were the bright side of my captivity; I read verses without end, and
wrote almost as many." The poems we have before us were written in the
Marshalsea. The book itself is very tiny and pretty, with a sort
of leafy trellis-work at the top and bottom of every page, almost