Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/166

146 time at Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently a member of Lincoln's Inn, Wither's first-published work was a contribution to the satire, popular at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century. His Abuses Stript and Whipt are not so formidable as their title, but the 1611 edition was suppressed, and their reissue in 1613 brought him to the Marshalsea prison. Meantime he had published a lament for Prince Henry, and an epithalamium for Princess Elizabeth, full of the naïve conceits with which the minor complimentary poetry of the period abounds, and of the "plain moral speaking" which Lamb admired. In prison he composed The Shepherd's Hunting, a series of very personal eclogues published in 1615. These, with Fidelia (1617), an "heroical epistle" of over twelve hundred lines, and Fair Virtue, the Mistress of Philarete (1617), a sustained and detailed lyrical eulogy of an ideal woman, contain the bulk of his best poetry, though there are some flowers of poetry in his Emblems, and the best of his religious verse is contained in the Hallelujah, or Britain's Second Remembrancer of 1641.

Wither's pastoral poetry is lyrical in spirit and form, a vehicle for the communication of his personal experiences and enthusiasms. He has a complete mastery of the seven-syllabled trochaic couplet. His style is easy, homely, and diffuse, comparatively little tormented with conceits, and when touched with enthusiasm for love and friendship, nature and song and virtue, is capable of a soaring flight. Of the charms of nature and consolations of song he writes with the