George Wither

George Wither, an English poet and satirist, son of George Wither, of Hampshire, was born at Bentworth, near Alton, on the 11th of June 1588. Later in his life he became a Parliamentarian, and is said in Wood's Athenae Oxonienses to have, after Charles I's execution, taken the royal regalia and "did first march about the room with a stately garb, and afterwards with a thousand apish and ridiculous actions exposed those sacred ornaments to contempt and laughter."

He was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, at the age of fifteen, and remained at the university for two years. His neighbours appear to have had no great opinion of him, for they advised his father to put him to "some mechanic trade." He was, however, sent to one of the Inns of Chancery, eventually obtaining an introduction at court.

He wrote an elegy (1612) on the death of Prince Henry, and a volume of gratulatory poems (1613) on the marriage of the princess Elizabeth, but his uncompromising character soon prepared trouble for him.

In 1611 he published "Abuses Stript and Whipt," twenty satires of general application directed against Revenge, Ambition, Lust and other abstractions. The volume included a poem called "The Scourge," in which the lord chancellor was attacked, and a series of epigrams. No copy of this edition is known, and it was perhaps suppressed, but in 1613 five editions appeared, and the author was lodged in the Marshalsea prison. The influence of the Princess Elizabeth, supported by a loyal "Satyre" to the king, in which he hints that an enemy at court had fitted personal meanings to his general invective, secured his release at the end of a few months. He had figured as one of the interlocutors, "Roget," in his friend William Browne's Shepherd's Pipe, with which were bound up eclogucs by other poets, among them one by Wither, and during his imprisonment he wrote what may be regarded as a continuation of Browne's work, The Shepherd's Hunting (printed I615), eclogues in which the two poets appear as "Willie" and "Roget" (in later editions "Philarete"). The fourth of these eclogues contains a famous passage in praise of poetry.

After his release he was admitted (1615) to Lincoln's Inn, and in the same year he printed privately Fidelia, a love elegy, of which there is a unique copy in the Bodlleian. Other editions of this book, which contained the lyric "Shall I, wasting in despair," appeared in 1617 and 1619.

In 1621 he returned to the satiric vein with Wither's Motto: Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo. Over 30,000 copies of this poem were sold, according to his own account, within a few months. Like his earlier invective, it was said to be libellous, and Wither was again imprisoned, but shortly afterwards released without formal trial on the plea that the book had been duly licensed.

In 1622 appeared his Faire-Virtue, The Mistresse of Phil'Arete, a long panegyric of a mistress, partly real, partly allegorical, written chiefly in the seven-syllabled verse of which he was a master.

Wither began as a moderate in politics and religion, but from this time his Puritan leanings became more and more pronounced, and his later work consists of religious poetry, and of controversial and political tracts. His "Hymnes and Songs of the Church" (1622—1623) were issued under a patent of King James I. ordaining that they should be bound up with every copy of the authorized metrical psalms offered for sale.

This patent was opposed, as inconsistent with their privilege to print the "singing-psalms," by the Stationers' Company, to Wither's great mortification and loss, and a second similar patent was finally disallowed by the House of Lords.

Wither was in London during the plague of 1625, and in 1628 published Britain's Remembrancer, a voluminous poem on the subject, interspersed with denunciations of the wickedness of the times, and prophecies of the disasters about to fall upon England. He also incidentally avenged Ben Jonson's satire on