Born, at Bentworth, Hants, 11 June 1588. Early education at a school at Colemore. Matric. Magdalen Coll., Oxford, 1604 [?]. Left Oxford after about three years. Imprisoned for libel, 1614. Student of Lincoln’s Inn, 1615. Served as Captain in cavalry regiment under Charles I., 1639. Served in Parliamentary Army, 1642; obtained rank of Major. Governor of Farnham Castle, Oct. to Dec. 1642. J.P. for Hampshire, Surrey and Essex, 1642–58. Major-General of Forces in Surrey, 1643 [?]. Master of the Statute Office, 1655 [?]. Imprisoned for libel, March 1662 to 1665. Died, in London, 2 May 1667. Buried in the Savoy Church. Works: “Prince Henrie’s Obsequies,” 1612; “Epithalamia,” 1612; “Abuses Stript and Whipt,” 1613; “A Satyre, dedicated to His Most Excellent Majestie,” 1614; “The Shepheards Hunting,” 1615; “Fidelia,” 1617; “A Preparation to the Psalter,” 1619; “Workes,” 1620; “Exercises upon the first Psalme,” 1620; “The Songs of the Old Testament,” 1621; “Wither’s Motto,” 1621; “Juvenilia,” 1622; “Faire-Virtue,” 1622; “The Hymnes and Songs of the Church,” 1623; “The Scholler’s Purgatory” [1625?]; “Britain’s Remembrance,” 1628; “The Psalmes of David translated into Lyrick verse,” 1632; “Collection of Emblemes,” 1634–35; “Read and Wonder” (anon.; ascribed to Wither), 1641; “Halelujah,” 1641; “Campo-Musæ,” 1643; “Se Defendo” [1643]; “Mercurius Rusticus” (anon.), 1643; “The Speech without Doore,” 1644; “The Two Incomparable Generalissimos,” 1644; “Letters of Advice,” 1645 [1644]; “Vox Pacifica,” 1645; “The Great Assizes holden in Parnassus” (anon.), 1645; “The Speech without Doore defended,” 1646; “Justiciarus Justificatus,” 1646; “What Peace to the Wicked?” (anon.), 1646; “Opobalsamum Anglicanum,” 1646; “Major Wither’s Disclaimer,” 1647; “Carmen Expostulatorium,” 1647; “Amygdale Britannica” (anon.), 1647; “Prosopopœia Britannica,” 1648; “Carmen Eucharisticon,” 1649; “Respublica Anglicana,” 1650; “The British Appeals,” 1651; “Three Grains of Spiritual Frankincense,” 1651; “The Dark Lantern,” 1653; “Westrow Revived,” 1653; “Vaticinum Casuale,” 1655; “Rapture at the Protector’s Recovery,” 1655; “Three Private Meditations,” 1655; “The Protector,” 1655; “Boni Ominis Votum,” 1656; “A Suddain Flash” (anon.), 1657; “Salt upon Salt,” 1659; “A Cordial Confection,” 1659; “Epistolium Vagum-Prosa-Metricum,” 1659; “Petition and Narrative” [1659]; “Furor Poeticus,” 1660; “Speculum Speculativum,” 1660; “Fides-Anglicana,” 1660; “An Improvement of Imprisonment,” 1661; “A Triple Paradox,” 1661; “The Prisoner’s Plea,” 1661; “A Proclamation in the Name of the King of Kings,” 1662; “Verses Intended to the King’s Majesty,” 1662; “Parallellogrammaton,” 1662; “Tuba Pacifica,” 1664; “A Memorandum to London,” 1665; “Meditations upon the Lord’s Prayer,” 1665; “Echoes from the Sixth Trumpet” [1666]; “Sighs for the Pitchers,” 1666; “Vaticina Poetica,” 1666. Posthumous: “Divine Poems on the Ten Commandments,” ed. by his daughter, 1688. He translated: Nemesius’ “The Nature of Man,” 1636. Collected Works: “Poems,” ed. by H. Morley, 1891.

Personal

  In the time of the civill warres, George Withers, the poet, begged Sir John Denham’s estate at Egham of the Parliament, in whose cause he was a captaine of horse. It (happened) that G. W. was taken prisoner, and was in danger of his life, having written severely against the king, &c. Sir John Denham went to the king, and desired his majestie not to hang him, for that whilest G. W. lived he should not be the worst poet in England.

  At this day it is hard to discover what parts in 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 be convicted of a libel when he named no names but Hate and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” where Faithful is arraigned for having “railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honourable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnel Delight, and the Lord Luxurious.” What unlucky jealousy could have tempted the great men of those days to appropriate such innocent abstractions to themselves! Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own possible virtue. He is for ever anticipating persecution and martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear them. Perhaps his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to censures, which he would otherwise have slipped by.

  Wither, though a man of very high character, seems to have had all his life what men of high character not unfrequently have, a certain facility for getting into what is vulgarly called hot-water.

  Wither was no exception to the general rule that those who abandon for public life the studies of poetry and philosophy suffer a steady degeneration, partaking like brooks and rivers, as Landor finely says, “the nature of that vast body whereunto they run, its dreariness, its bitterness, its foam, its storms, its everlasting noise and commotion.” Not that Wither ever became quite the fanatic that he has been represented to have been…. His own charitableness was considerably tempered by an ineradicable contentiousness. He lived under eleven different forms of government, and he managed to be more or less at loggerheads with them all.

General

  George Wither, a most profuse pourer forth of English rhime, not without great pretence to a poetical zeal against the vices of his times, in his “Motto,” his “Remembrancer,” and other such like satirical works…. But the most of poetical fancy which I remember to have found in any of his writings is a little piece of pastoral poetry called “The Shepherd’s Huntings.”

  Honest George Withers, though a rustic poet, hath been very acceptable; as to some for his prophecies, so to others, for his plain country honesty.

Wretched Withers.

  This beautiful old song [“The Shepherd’s Resolution”] was written by a poet, whose name would have been utterly forgotten, if it had not been preserved by Swift, as a term of contempt. “Dryden and Wither” are coupled by him like the “Bavius and Mævius” of Virgil. Dryden however has had justice done him by posterity: and as for Wither, though of subordinate merit, that he was not altogether devoid of genius, will be judged from the following stanzas. The truth is, Wither was a very voluminous party-writer: had as his political and satirical strokes rendered him extremely popular in his lifetime: so afterwards, when these were no longer relished, they totally consigned his writings to oblivion.

  George Wither, began to display his rhyming talent, which he exercised for a long course of years, and had many admirers among readers of a lower class. He was, in several respects, an unsuccessful, but was ever a persevering writer.

  Amongst his numerous verses, which he seems to have scribbled with endless profusion, and with a total disregard to the art of blotting, there are entire compositions, which could not have proceeded, but from one, who was endowed with a strong poetical spirit. In those instances he is generally characterized by an easy elegance, and a copiousness of unaffected sentiment. A man of real taste, who has an opportunity of comparing all his publications, many of which can now seldom be met with, would do an acceptable service to the literary world, by giving a judicious selection from them.

  Dismissing with contempt the puerilities and conceits which deformed the pages of so many of his contemporaries, he cultivated, with almost uniform assiduity, a simplicity of style, and an expression of natural sentiment and feeling, which have occasioned the revival of his choicest compositions in the nineteenth century, and will for ever stamp them with a permanent value.

  From youth to age George continued to pour forth his lucubrations, in prophesy, remonstrance, complaint, and triumph, through good and evil report, through all vicissitudes of fortune: at one time in command among the saints, and at another scrawling his thoughts in jail, when pen and ink were denied him, with red ochre upon a trencher. It is generally allowed that his taste and genius for poetry did not improve in the political contest. Some of his earliest pieces display the native amenity of a poet’s imagination but as he mixed with the turbulent times, his fancy grew muddy with the stream. While Milton in the same cause brought his learning and zeal as a partisan, he left the Muse behind him, as a mistress too sacred to be introduced into party brawlings; Wither, on the contrary, took his Muse along with him to the camp and the congregation, and it is little to be wondered at that her cap should have been torn and her voice made hoarse in the confusion.

  George Wither, by siding with the less poetical though more prosperous party in the civil war, and by a profusion of temporary writings to serve the ends of faction and folly, has left a name which we were accustomed to despise, till Ellis did justice to “that playful fancy, pure taste, and artless delicacy of sentiment, which distinguish the poetry of his early youth.” His best poems were published in 1622, with the title, “Mistress of Philarete.” Some of them are highly beautiful, and bespeak a mind above the grovelling Puritanism into which he afterwards fell. I think there is hardly any thing in our lyric poetry of this period equal to Wither’s lines on his Muse, published by Ellis.

  Wither, who wrote of poetry like a poet, and in return has been dishonored and misprised by some of his own kind—a true sincere poet of blessed oracles!

  From among the host of writers using verse for social purposes, one stands out very conspicuously as the popular satirist of the day. This was George Wither, whose poetry had been all but forgotten…. With his self-satisfaction he conjoined some real strength of brain, a certain elevation of aim, and a perfect dauntlessness of spirit. In his very first writings he had come forward as a plain man who was to speak truth and care for nobody…. And so, through the world, from that time forward, he continues to go, self-labelled as “Wither, the man that would not flatter.” His “Motto,” published in 1618, was, as we have said, a detailed exhibition of his character to the public in this light. He had had his portrait painted; under it he had written the motto “Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo;” this motto he had adopted as his impress…. Wither, in addition to his satires, his pastoral narrations, and his devotional hymns, had written, chiefly as interspersed lyrics in his earlier poems, some really good secular songs. One of these is still to be heard occasionally in drawing-rooms; and a very good song it is:

	Shall I, wasting in despair
	Die because a woman’s fair?

  It would have been very well to have republished the “Fair Virtue,” and “Shepherd’s Hunting” of George Wither, which contain all the true poetry he ever wrote; but we can imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred pages of his “Hymns and Songs,” whose only use, that we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incorrigible poetasters.

  One excellence for which all Wither’s writings are eminent, his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His unaffected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it,—but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill.

  Throughout it is distinguished by a certain straightforward simplicity of good English thought and English word. His hymns remind me, in the form of their speech, of Gascoigne.

  It is somewhat difficult to tell the student what may be considered the chief production of George Wither. His “Shepheards’ Hunting” is generally associated with his name. But he was the author of more than a hundred works besides, the collection together of which no one has as yet been found sufficiently courageous to undertake. Very many of these productions are of a political nature. He was also the author of a number of religious pieces, of some very graceful songs and poems, and of some very biting satires under the title “Abuses Stript and Whipt.” “Britain’s Remembrancer” is a long and able poem, written by him in London, during the plague of 1627, and is by some considered the most valuable of all his writings.

  Braithwaite wrote in 1615—

	“And long may England’s Thespian springs be known
	By lovely Wither and by bonny Browne.”

But the wish has hardly been fulfilled, and there are few readers who would not be a little surprised by the epithet here applied to the Puritan poet. No real lover of poetry will however grudge it him. He is one of the few masters of octosyllabic verse in our language. Lamb has dwelt lovingly on its curious felicities, and for compass and variety it would not be easy to name its superior. It is the one form of verse pre-eminently suited to Wither, who has achieved no such triumphs with the heroic couplet. But it is not only for beauty of poetic form that Wither deserved Braithwaite’s enthusiastic epithet. Like the Charmides of Plato’s dialogue, he has “what is much more important, a beautiful soul.” Never was there a purer or more honourable spirit, or one which kept closer to the best it knew, and as Wither has revealed himself in his works in a way in which few poets have done, it is natural to read him not only with admiration but with sympathy.

  The time has passed when this voluminous writer can be treated by any competent critic with the contempt of the age of Anne. The scorn of Pope still clings, however, to the “wretched Withers,” whose name is misspelt, and of whose works he had probably seen nothing but the satires. Nor would it be safe, on the score of exquisite beauties discoverable in the early lyrics of Wither, to overlook the radical faults of his style. One or two generous appreciators of Jacobean verse have done this, and have claimed for Wither a very high place in English poetry. But proportion, judgment, taste must count for something, and in these qualities this lyrist was deplorably deficient. The careful student, not of excerpts made by loving and partial hands, but of the bulk of his published writings, will be inclined to hesitate before he admits that Wither was a great poet. He will rather call him a very curious and perhaps unique instance of a tiresome and verbose scribbler, to whom in his youth there came unconsidered flashes of most genuine and exquisite poetry.

  His heights and depths approach the heights and depths of Wordsworth; whilst his fecundity is no less amazing than his metrical facility. Would that we had one more lyric like the immortal “Shall I wasting in despair” for many pages of eclogues and satires, excellent although many of them undoubtedly are.

  It is now universally recognised that Wither was a poet of exquisite grace, although only for a short season in his long career. Had his last work been his “Faire Virtue,” he would have figured in literary history in the single capacity of a fascinating lyric poet. He was one of the few masters in English of heptasyllabic couplet, and disclosed almost all its curious felicities. But his fine gifts failed him after 1622, and during the last forty-five years of his life his verse is mainly remarkable for its mass, fluidity, and flatness. It usually lacks any genuine literary quality and often sinks into imbecile dogerel. Ceasing to be a poet, Wither became in middle life a garrulous and tedious preacher, in platitudinous prose and verse, of the political and religious creeds of the commonplace middle-class puritan.