Wither, a V. George Wither. Not all the poets of this period were royalists. Wither, born in Hampshire in 1588, was a Puritan, and wrote satires in verse against the royalists. Educated Puritan poet. at Oxford, he afterwards assisted his father, who was a farmer. In 1613 he came to London, and there wrote his satires, Abuses Stript and Whipt, condemning the vices of the court. If the great ones to offend be bold I see no reason but they should be told. Charles Lamb was a great admirer of Wither, and points out that his satires differ essentially from those of Dryden. In Wither there His satires. 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. For his bold out-speaking Wither was imprisoned in the Marshalsea,1 and while a captive there wrote his pastorals, the Shepherds Hunting, published in 1615. He fought in the Parliamentary army, and lived on till 1667. In the poems that were not satires, Wither belongs to the "school of Ben". In the Shepherds Hunting His lighter occur the lines in which he expresses the effect of poetry on the mind generally, and also the power of the true poet "to extract pleasure from common objects". Poetry, he writes, poem. doth tell me where to borrow, 1A London prison that existed until the present century. Her divine skill taught me this, In some other wiser man. To quote Lamb again, "the prison notes of Wither are finer than the wood-notes of most of his poetical brethren". In 1622 Wither published his Fair Virtue the Mistress of Philarete,1 which clearly shows his love of nature. The beginning describes very charmingly his native Hampshire, with the distant view of the Isle of Wight. He personifies virtue (or the qualities which make the ideal. life), as a woman to be loved. Interspersed are songs, some of which-notably that beginning, Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair?— have become famous. He also wrote hymns that find a place in every collection. VI. Waller and Denham: Poets of Transition. Although these poets were as courtly as Carew and Lovelace and the rest of the Cavalier poets, they were of a more serious turn of mind. Their work marks the transition from the unfettered Elizabethan manner to the more precise and formal art of Dryden and Pope. Edmund Waller, the son of a sister of John 1 A Greek word meaning lover of virtue. Hampden, the patriot, who died at Chalgrove Field in 1643, was born in 1605. He was educated Waller at Eton and Cambridge, and early entered parliament. He was closely connected with political affairs, and living till 1687, seems to have kept in favour with the various parties who were in power during his lifetime. His character has been well drawn by Clarendon in his History of the Rebellion. and Waller's poems chiefly celebrate Lady Dorothy Sidney under the name of Sacharissa. In this probably simulated passion he was following the Elizabethans; in Sacharissa. any case, if his regard was sincere, it met with no return. Dorothy Sidney was a niece of Sir Philip Sidney, and married the Earl of Sunderland. Waller visited Penshurst where she lived, and in their old age they seem to have been friends. The old lady once, it is said, asked Waller when he would write such fine verses to her again. “Madam,” replied the poet, "when you are as young and as handsome again." Among his best known poems is the Message of the Rose. How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair! Besides lyrics he wrote poems in the heroic couplet, afterwards to be employed with such power by Dryden and Pope. The smoothness of Waller's versification in this metre shows a considerable advance on his predecessors and contemporaries; "he added something to our elegance of diction, and something to our propriety of thought ".1 In 1642 Sir John Denham (1615-1669) published a poem in heroic couplets entitled Cooper's Denham. Hill, but it did not receive its final form until the edition of 1655. The poet soliloquizes on the Thames flowing at the foot of the hill His "Cooper's where he reclines, and comments on the view Hill”. spread out before him. Afar off, he sees London, which like a mist beneath a hill doth rise; Whose state and wealth, the business and the crowd, He then proceeds to describe Windsor, and with an eye for the beautiful notes the position of the Castle, "A crown of such majestic towers", at the top of a hill Mark'd out for such an use, as if 't were meant T'invite the builder. It is very certain that Windsor Castle looks well no matter from what point of view we see it. where Runnymede, was that charter seal'd, wherein the crown All marks of arbitrary pow'r lays down, and other places to be seen from the top of Cooper's Hill, are described. Mingled with the descriptions are moralizings, as when London is said to be a place where Luxury and wealth, like war and peace, Are each the other's ruin and increase, 1 Dr. Johnson. and to the river itself are addressed the often-quoted lines: Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream Tho' deep, yet clear; tho' gentle, yet not dull; Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full. In the next century such subjects and mode of treatment were greatly in vogue, and produced famous examples in the poems of Johnson and Goldsmith. Denham's versification approaches nearer that of Dryden than does Waller's. To Waller's smoothness, Denham added strength. Dryden says of Cooper's Hill that "for the majesty of the style it is, and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing"; and Pope, when mentioning Cooper's Hill in his own poem of Windsor Forest has the line, Here his first lays majestic Denham sung. VII. Butler. As was to be expected, the fierce struggle between the Puritans and the Established Church gave rise to much satirical writing on both sides. The most Butler. famous satirist on the royalist side was Samuel Butler. A native of Worcestershire, he was born in 1612, and educated at the College School, Worcester. He found employment, probably as secretary, in the household of Lord Grey de Ruthin, in whose library. Butler had means to acquire the stores of learning he afterwards put to use in his poems. Later he entered the service of Sir Samuel Luke, a strict Presbyterian, who no doubt intensified his dislike of the Puritans. 1663 he published the first part of Hudibras; the second followed in the next year. The third part did not appear until 1678. Butler hoped in vain for some reward from Charles II., and died poor and neglected in 1680. In Hudibras is a political satire directed. against the Puritans. It |