reasons that are not apparent. Each of the twenty satires discloses the evils lurking in abstractions like Revenge, Ambition, Lust, Weakness, and the like, and, although some of the anecdotal digressions may have had personal application, the clue is lost. Wither declared that he had, ‘as opportunity was offered, glanced in general tearmes at the reproofe of a few thinges of such nature as I feared might disparage or prejudice the Commonwealth … [but] I unhappily fell into the displeasure of the state: and all my apparent good intentions were so mistaken by the aggrauations of some yll affected towards my indeauours, that I was shutt up from the society of mankind’ (The Schollers Purgatory, Spenser Soc. pp. 2–3). Wither was committed to the Marshalsea prison, but the Princess Elizabeth is reported to have intervened on his behalf, and her intervention, supported by a poetic appeal to the king from Wither himself, procured his release after a few months. The poet's appeal was entitled ‘A Satyre: Dedicated to His Most Excellent Maiestie’ (London, printed by Thomas Snodham for George Norton, 1615, sm. 8vo; in some copies ‘written’ is found for ‘dedicated’).
Wither shed an unaccustomed lustre on the Marshalsea by penning some of his best poetry while a prisoner there. He had some hand in William Browne's pastoral poems. In the first eclogue of Browne's ‘Shepherd's Pipe’ (1614) he was introduced as an interlocutor under the name of ‘Roget,’ and to the same volume Wither contributed the second and fourth eclogues which were appended to Browne's work. In one of these Wither introduced his friends Christopher Brooke and Browne under the names of ‘Cuttie’ and ‘Willy;’ the other he dedicated ‘to his truly loving and worthy friend Mr. W. Browne.’ Fired by Browne's example, Wither straightway continued the ‘Shepherd's Pipe’ in a similar poem wholly of his own composition, which he entitled ‘The Shepherd's Hunting.’ This was published in 1615, and was described on the title-page as consisting of ‘certaine eglogues, written during the time of the author's imprisonment in the Marshalsey’ (London, printed by W. White for George Norton, 1615, 8vo; reprinted in the ‘Workes,’ 1620, and in ‘Juvenilia,’ 1622 and 1633). It was dedicated to the ‘visitants’ to his prison cell. The interlocutors were Browne, under the name of Willie, and the poet himself, under the name of Roget, a designation which he altered in editions subsequent to 1620 to Philarete. In the fourth eclogue appears, in his favourite seven-syllabled rhyming couplets (the metre of Milton's ‘L'Allegro’), his classical eulogy of the gift of poetry for the wealth and strength it confers on its possessor. In 1616 Browne lauded Wither, in company with John Davies of Hereford, in the second song of the second book of ‘Britannia's Pastorals’ (ll. 323–6); to this volume Wither contributed commendatory verses.
‘The Shepherd's Hunting’ was succeeded by another little volume of charming verse entitled ‘Fidelia,’ a poetical lament in epistolary form from a desolate maiden forsaken by her lover. It seems to have been first printed in small octavo in 1615 for private circulation. A copy of the private edition is in the Bodleian Library. The edition was published for sale under the title ‘Fidelia, written by G. W. of Lincolnes Inne, Gentleman’ (London, printed by Nicholas Okes, 1617, 12mo). In an edition ‘newly corrected and augmented,’ dated in 1619, there were added for the first time two songs, one of them the matchless lyric ‘Shall I wasting in despair’ (a new edition of 1620 was printed by John Beale for Walkley, and it reappeared in the ‘Juvenilia’).
Of literary interest, although of far smaller literary value than ‘Fidelia,’ was the poem called ‘Wither's Motto. Nec habeo, nec careo, nec curo’ (London, printed for John Marriott, 1621, 8vo), which at once reached a second edition and achieved an extraordinary popularity. There is an engraved frontispiece with a whole-length figure of the author looking towards heaven. Wither, who confusingly dates its first appearance in 1618, says that about thirty thousand copies were printed and published within a few months (Fragmenta Prophetica, p. 47). It is a fluent series of egotistical reflections on the conduct of life, intermingled with some spirited sarcasm at the expense of the mean and vicious. Its sound morality recommended it to the serious-minded, and on the strength of it John Winthrop [q. v.] took a hopeful view of ‘our modern spirit of poetry’ (Winthrop, Life and Letters, 1864, p. 396). Some persons in high station deemed the poem a reflection on current politics and politicians, and Wither was for a second time ordered to the Marshalsea (Court and Times of James I, ii. 266). In the course of his examination he denied the charge of libel, and declared that Drayton had approved the poem in manuscript (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1619–23, pp. 268, 274–5). It was admitted that the Stationers' Company had refused a license for the first edition, but that the second was licensed after some passages had been struck out. Wither was liberated with-
