Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/268

 sellers refused to bind up copies with the authorised psalter or to sell it in any shape, and warned their customers that it was an incompetent performance. Wither protested warmly, but with little avail. Unfortunately he did not carry with him the sympathy of all his fellow-craftsmen. He was still the friend of William Browne, of Richard Brathwaite, who applied to him the epithet ‘lovely’ in 1615, and of Drayton, to whose ‘Polyolbion’ (pt. ii.) he contributed in 1622 an enthusiastic commendation. But his successes were viewed with jealousy by Ben Jonson and his band of disciples. Alexander Gill the elder [q. v.] had quoted Wither's work with approval in his ‘Logonomia Anglica’ (1619), and Jonson had quarrelled in consequence with Gill, whose son retorted with violence. Jonson revenged himself by caricaturing Wither under the title ‘Chronomastix’ (that is, satirist of time) in the masque called ‘Time Vindicated,’ which was presented at court on Twelfth night 1623–4. Much sarcasm was here expended on Wither's quarrel with his printers, and finally Fame was represented as disowning him, despite the outcry of friends who deify him.

Wither vigorously stated his grievances against the booksellers in a highly interesting prose tract which he entitled ‘The Schollers Purgatory, discouered In the Stationers Commonwealth. … Imprinted for the Honest Stationers,’ 12mo. There is no mention of date or place of publication. It was probably printed abroad about 1624. In the form of an address to the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishops assembled in convocation, Wither narrated with spirit the long series of wrongs which he and other authors of his day suffered at the hands of their publishers. The stationers sought to stop the publication. They moved the court of high commission to institute an inquiry. Wither was called upon to explain why he issued the volume without a license. He admitted that parts had been printed under his direction by George Wood, and boasted that the edition consisted of three thousand copies (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1623–5, p. 143).

Wither was in London during the plague of 1625, and, despite the distractions of personal controversy, penned two accounts of it. One he called ‘The Historie of the Pestilence or the proceedings of Justice and Mercy manifested an [sic] the Great Assizes holden about London in the yeare 1625.’ This remains in a folio manuscript in the author's autograph in the Pepysian Collection at Magdalene College, Cambridge. At the same time he published a second treatise on the subject, as ‘Britains Remembrancer: Containing a Narrative of the Plague lately past; a Declaration of the Mischiefs present; and a Prediction of Judgments to come (if Repentance prevent not),’ 1628, 12mo. He was still under the stationers' ban. No license was obtainable for this book, and he caused it to be printed ‘for Great Britaine’ at his own risk, and, it is said, with his own hand (Court and Times of Charles I, i. 367). John Grismond undertook to sell copies. The impression consisted of four thousand copies. There is a long preliminary address to the king in verse and a ‘premonition’ in prose. The voluminous poem is itself in eight cantos of heroic rhymes. Vivid descriptions of the plague are interspersed with much wild denunciation of the impiety of the nation and anticipation of future trouble. Mindful of Jonson's onslaught, he referred to the ‘drunken conclave’ at which Jonson had denied him the title of poet. He claimed with much self-satisfaction in later years to have clearly foretold in this volume all the future misfortunes that the country witnessed in his lifetime.

A visit to the continent seems to have followed, and Wither appears to have been received in audience by his early patroness, the Princess Elizabeth, now the exiled queen of Bohemia. To her he gratefully dedicated his next publication, ‘The Psalms of David, translated into Lyrick verse according to the Scope of the Original, and illustrated with a short Argument and a briefe Prayer or Meditation before and after every Psalme.’ This was printed in the Netherlands by Cornelius Gerrits van Breughel in 1632, and formed a thick square octavo. As early as April 1625 he had visited Cambridge in order to find a printer for the work, but had met with none to undertake it (cf. ib. i. 12). Subsequently, in January 1633–4, Wither, in continuance of the warfare with the London stationers, summoned all or most of them before the council to answer for a ‘contempt of the great seal’ in their continued defiance of his patent of 1623. The judgment of the court disallowed that part of Wither's patent which directed that his ‘Hymnes’ should be bound up with the authorised ‘Psalter’ (ib. ii. 236). Immediately afterwards he made his peace with the publishers and his relations with them were thenceforth amicable.

The plates which were originally engraved by Crispin Pass for the ‘Emblems’ of Rollenhagius, and had appeared with mottoes in Greek, Latin, or Italian (Cologne, 1613; and Arnheim, 1616), were purchased in 1634 by Henry Taunton, a London publisher, with