Whoever expects to find in the satirical pieces of this writer any of those peculiarities which pleased him in the satires of Dryden or Pope, will be grievously disappointed.  Here are no high-finished characters, no nice traits of individual nature, few or no personalities.  The game run down is coarse general vice, or folly as it appears in classes.  A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is stript and whipt; no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously anatomized, and read upon.  But to a well-natured mind there is a charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply compensates the want of those luxuries.  Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base actions.  At this day it is hard to discover what parts of 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 honorable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal 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 forever 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.

The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in the present day.  It is certainly not such as we should expect from a poet “soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and his singing robes about him;"[1] nor is it such as he has shown in his Philarete, and in some parts of his Shepherds Hunting.  He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober gray or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness.  The deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled Revenge.  The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly interesting.  While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger, the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, that it was some higher principle than fear which counselled this forbearance.

[Footnote 1:  Milton.]