ON THE POETICAL WORKS OF GEORGE WITHER. THE poems of G. Wither are distinguished be convicted of a libel when he named no by a hearty homeliness of manner, and a names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and plain moral speaking. He seems to have Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the passed his life in one continued act of an Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is innocent self-pleasing. That which he calls arraigned for having "railed on our noble his Motto is a continued self-eulogy of two Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly thousand lines, yet we read it to the end of his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, without any feeling of distaste, almost the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord without a consciousness that we have been Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy could listening all the while to a man praising have tempted the great men of those days to himself. There are none of the cold particles appropriate such innocent abstractions to in it, the hardness and self-ends, which themselves? render vanity and egotism hateful. He seems Wither seems to have contemplated to a to be praising another person, under the degree of idolatry his own possible virtue. mask of self: or rather, we feel that it was He is for ever anticipating persecution and indifferent to him where he found the virtue martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, which he celebrates; whether another's to try how he can bear them. Perhaps his bosom or his own were its chosen receptacle. premature defiance sometimes made him His poems are full, and this in particular is obnoxious to censures which he would otherone downright confession, of a generous self-wise have slipped by. seeking. But by self he sometimes means a great deal,—his friends, his principles, his country, the human race. Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or Pope, will be grievously disappointed. Here are no high-finished characters, no nice traits of individual nature, few or no personalities. The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as it appears in classes. A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is stript and whipt; no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously anatomised, and read upon. But to a well-natured mind there is a charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply compensates the want of those luxuries. Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base actions. At this day it is hard to discover what parts of the poem here particularly alluded to, Abuses Stript and Whipt, could have occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places more suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to listen after ill reports? That a man should The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in the present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and his singing robes about him ;”* nor is it such as he has shown in his Philarete, and in some parts of his Shepherds Hunting. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober grey or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness. The deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunetions against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled Revenge. The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger, the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, that it was some higher principle than fear which counselled this forbearance. Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have abated a jot of that free spirit which sets its mark upon his • Milton. 1 whose singing furnishes pretence for an occasional change of metre: though the sevensyllable line, in which the main part of it is written, is that in which Wither has shown himself so great a master, that I do not know that I am always thankful to him for the exchange. writings, as much as a predominant feature of independence impresses every page of our late glorious Burns; but the elder poet wraps his proof-armour closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards; he is thinking too much of annoying the foe to be quite easy within; the spiritual defences of Wither are a perpetual source of inward Wither has chosen to bestow upon the sunshine, the magnanimity of the modern is lady whom he commends the name of Arete, not without its alloy of soreness, and a sense or Virtue; and, assuming to himself the of injustice, which seems perpetually to gall character of Philarete, or Lover of Virtue, and irritate. Wither was better skilled in there is a sort of propriety in that heaped the "sweet uses of adversity;" he knew measure of perfections which he attributes how to extract the "precious jewel" from to this partly real, partly allegorical personthe head of the "toad," without drawing any age. Drayton before him had shadowed his of the "ugly venom along with it. The mistress under the name of Idea, or Perfect prison notes of Wither are finer than the Pattern, and some of the old Italian lovewood notes of most of his poetical brethren. strains are couched in such religious terms The description in the Fourth Eclogue of his as to make it doubtful whether it be a misShepherds Hunting (which was composed tress, or Divine Grace, which the poet is during his imprisonment in the Marshalsea) addressing. of the power of the Muse to extract pleasure from common objects, has been oftener quoted, and is more known, than any part of his writings. Indeed, the whole Eclogue is in a strain so much above not only what himself, but almost what any other poet has written, that he himself could not help noticing it; he remarks that his spirits had been raised higher than they were wont, through the love of poesy." The praises of Poetry have been often sung in ancient and in modern times; strange powers have been ascribed to it of influence over animate and inanimate auditors; its force over fascinated crowds has been acknowledged; but, before Wither, no one ever celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this divine gift confers upon its possessor. Fame, and that too after death, was all which hitherto the poets had promised themselves from their art. It seems to have been left to Wither to discover that poetry was a present possession, as well as a rich reversion, and that the Muse had promise of both lives, of this, and of that which was to come. The Mistress of Philarete is in substance a panegyric protracted through several thousand lines in the mouth of a single speaker, but diversified, so as to produce an almost dramatic effect, by the artful introduction of some ladies, who are rather auditors than interlocutors in the scene; and of a boy, In this poem (full of beauties) there are two passages of pre-eminent merit. The first is where the lover, after a flight of rapturous commendation, expresses his wonder why all men that are about his mistress, even to her very servants, do not view her with the same eyes that he does. "Sometime I do admire All men burn not with desire: Some good judgments blind should be, She for lovers should not rest." The other is, where he has been comparing her beauties to gold, and stars, and the most excellent things in nature; and, fearing to be accused of hyperbole, the common charge against poets, vindicates himself by boldly taking upon him, that these comparisons are no hyperboles; but that the best things in nature do, in a lover's eye, fall short of those excellences which he adores in her. "What pearls, what rubies can on Cuzzoni, to my feeling at least, very deliciously; but Wither, whose darling measure it seems to have been, may show, that in skilful hands it is capable of expressing the subtilest movements of passion. So true it is, which Drayton seems to have felt, that it is the poet who modifies the metre, not the metre the poet; in his own words, that "It's possible to climb; To kindle, or to stake; Altho' in Skelton's rhime." • A long line is a line we are long repeating. In the Shepherds Hunting take the following "If thy verse doth bravely tower, As she makes wing, she gets power ; Then she rests with fame at last." What longer measure can go beyond the majesty of this! what Alexandrine is half so long in pronouncing or expresses labour slowly but strongly surmounting | difficulty with the life with which it is done in the second of these lines? or what metre could go beyond these from Philarete "Her true beauty leaves behind 1 LETTERS, UNDER ASSUMED SIGNATURES, PUBLISHED IN "THE REFLECTOR." MR. REFLECTOR,-I was born under the shadow of St. Dunstan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this two-fold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar. The same day which gave me to the world, saw London happy in the celebration of her great annual feast. This I cannot help looking upon as a lively omen of the future great good-will which I was destined to bear toward the city, resembling in kind that solicitude which every Chief Magistrate is supposed to feel for whatever concerns her interests and well-being. Indeed I consider myself in some sort a speculative Lord Mayor of London for though circumstances unhappily preclude me from the hope of ever arriving at the dignity of a gold chain and Spital Sermon, yet thus much will I say of myself in truth, that Whittington with his Cat (just emblem of vigilance and a furred gown) never went beyond me in affection which I bear to the citizens. enough with rural objects to understand tolerably well ever after the poets, when they declaim in such passionate terms in favour of a country life. For my own part, now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-lane Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures, than I could ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or Epsom Downs. This passion for crowds is nowhere feasted so full as in London. The man must have a rare recipe for melancholy who can be dull in Fleet-street. I am naturally inclined to hypochondria, but in London it vanishes, like all other ills. Often, when I have felt a weariness or distaste at home, have I rushed out into her crowded Strand, and fed my humour, till tears have wetted my cheek for unutterable sympathies with the multitudinous moving picture, which she never fails to present at all hours, like the scenes of a shifting pantomime. I was born, as you have heard, in a crowd. This has begot in me an entire affection for that way of life, amounting to an almost The very deformities of London, which insurmountable aversion from solitude and give distaste to others, from habit do not rural scenes. This aversion was never in- displease me. The endless succession of terrupted or suspended, except for a few shops where Fancy miscalled Folly is supyears in the younger part of my life, during plied with perpetual gauds and toys, excite a period in which I had set my affections in me no puritanical aversion. I gladly beupon a charming young woman. Every man, hold every appetite supplied with its proper while the passion is upon him, is for a time food. The obliging customer, and the obliged at least addicted to groves and meadows and tradesman-things which live by bowing, purling streams. During this short period and things which exist but for homage—do of my existence, I contracted just familiarity not affect me with disgust; from habit I perceive nothing but urbanity, where other men, more refined, discover meanness: I love the very smoke of London, because it has been the medium most familiar to my vision. I see grand principles of honour at work in the dirty ring which encompasses two combatants with fists, and principles of no less eternal justice in the detection of a pickpocket. The salutary astonishment with which an execution is surveyed, convinces me more forcibly than a hundred volumes of abstract polity, that the universal instinct of man in all ages has leaned to order and good government. Thus an art of extracting morality from the commonest incidents of a town life is attained by the same well-natured alchymy with which the Foresters of Arden, in a beautiful country, "Found tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything." Where has spleen her food but in London ! Humour, Interest, Curiosity, suck at her | measureless breasts without a possibility of being satiated. Nursed amid her noise, her crowds, her beloved smoke, what have I been doing all my life, if I have not lent out my heart with usury to such scenes! I am, Sir, your faithful servant, ON BURIAL SOCIETIES; AND THE CHARACTER OF AN UNDERTAKER. TO THE EDITOR OF MR. REFLECTOR,—I was amused the other day with having the following notice thrust into my hand by a man who gives out bills at the corner of Fleet-market. Whether he saw any prognostics about me, that made him judge such notice seasonable, I cannot say; I might perhaps carry in a countenance (naturally not very florid) traces of a fever which had not long left me. Those fellows have a good instinctive way of guessing at the sort of people that are likeliest to pay attention to their papers. "BURIAL SOCIETY. "A favourable opportunity now offers to any person, of either sex, who would wish to be buried in a genteel manner, by paying one shilling entrance, and two-pence per week for the benefit of the stock. Members to be free in six months. The money to be paid at Mr. Middleton's, at the sign of the First and the Last, Stonecutter's-street, Fleetmarket. The deceased to be furnished as follows:-A strong elm coffin, covered with superfine black, and furnished with two rows, all round, close drove, best japanned nails, and adorned with ornamental drops, a handsome plate of inscription, Angel above, and Flower beneath, and four pair of handsome THE REFLECTOR." handles, with wrought gripes; the coffin to be well pitched, lined, and ruffled with fine crape; a handsome crape shroud, cap, and pillow. For use, a handsome velvet pall, three gentlemen's cloaks, three crape hatbands, three hoods and scarfs, and six pair of gloves; two porters equipped to attend the funeral, a man to attend the same with band and gloves; also, the burial fees paid, if not exceeding one guinea." "Man," says Sir Thomas Browne, “is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." Whoever drew up this little advertisement certainly understood this appetite in the species, and has made abundant provision for it. It really almost induces a tædium vitæ upon one to read it. Methinks I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,-how feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down! what aching head can resist the temptation to repose, which the crape shroud, the cap, and the pillow present; what sting is there in death, which the handles with wrought gripes are not calculated to pluck away? what victory in the grave, which the drops and the velvet pall do not render at least extremely disputable but above all, |