one moment at the summit, plunges it at the next into the pit of pain and oblivion.  Steadily, uniformly, the unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal how “Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace,” and how “Sir Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded”; how “King Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts,” and how “Sigeburt, for his wicked life, was thrust from his throne and miserably slain by a herdsman.”  It gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise that the immense popularity of this book must have been mainly due to the fact that it comforted the multitudes who groaned under a harsh and violent despotism to be told over and over again that cruel kings and unjust judges habitually came at last to a bad end.

A POET IN PRISON

THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING:  being Certain Eglogues written during the time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey.  By George Wyther, Gentleman.  London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are to be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre. 1615.

If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it was George Wither.  When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be recollected.  He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton’s page-boy.  Swift, in The Battle of the Books, brings in this poet as the meanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army.  Pope speaks of him with the utmost freedom as “wretched Withers.”  It is true that he lived too long and wrote too much—­a great deal too much.  Mr. Hazlitt gives the titles of more than one hundred of his publications, and some of them are wonderfully unattractive.  I should not like to be shut up on a rainy day with his Salt upon Salt, which seems to have lost its savour, nor do I yearn to blow upon his Tuba Pacifica, although it was “disposed of rather for love than money.”  The truth is that good George Wither lost his poetry early, was an upright, honest, and patriotic man who unhappily developed into a scold, and got into the bad habit of pouring out “precautions,” “cautional expressions,” “prophetic phrensies,” “epistles at random,” “personal contributions to the national humiliation,” “passages,” “raptures,” and “allarums,” until he really became the greatest bore in Christendom.  It was Charles Lamb who swept away this whole tedious structure of Wither’s later writings and showed us what a lovely poet he was in his youth.