and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, rejoiced to find that
"the cage doth some birds good." Next morning he returns and brings
Cutty, or Cuddy, with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisoner
that all England is taking an interest in him, and that this adversity
has made him much more popular than he was before. But Willy and
Cuddy are extremely anxious to know what it was that caused Roget's
imprisonment, and at last he agrees to tell them. Hitherto the poem
has been written in _ottava rima_, a form which is sufficiently
uncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand special
notice in this case. In a prose postscript to this book Wither tells
us that the title, _The Shepherd's Hunting_, which he seems to feel
needs explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now,
to the publisher. But perhaps this was an afterthought, for in the
account he gives to Willy and Cuddy he certainly suggests the title
himself. He represents himself as the shepherd given up to the
delights of hunting the human passions through the soul; the simile
seems a little confused, because he represents these qualities not
as the quarry, but as the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon is
reversed; instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the master
hunts his dogs. At all events, the result is that he "dips his staff
in blood, and onwards leads his thunder to the wood," where he is
ignominiously captured by his Majesty's gamekeeper. But the allegory
hardly runs upon all-fours.

The next "eglogue" represents again another visit to the prisoner, and
this time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is
John Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to _The Shepherd's
Pipe_. Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiric
manner he had adopted, to his hurt, in _Abuses stript and whipt_.