George Wither (1588-1667) was one of the poets who "wrote too much and lived too long". Only his song, "Shall I wasting in despair," can be said to live, despite his pleasant fluency and love of country contentments in "Philarete" (1622), "Fidelia," and "The Shepherd's Hunting" (1615). He was among the favourites of Charles Lamb, who discovered the neglected poet, the laughing-stock of the wits of the Restoration. He is also highly praised by Swinburne in a most interesting essay, "Charles Lamb and George Wither". Wither is sometimes good, always copious.
[1] Was Donne copying a poem by Empedocles?
[CHAPTER XXIII.]
LATE JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE PROSE.
Burton.
Robert Burton, author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," would have been despised by Overbury both as "a mere Fellow of a House" and as "a melancholy man," while to Milton he must have seemed one of those spiritual pastors whose "hungry sheep look up and are not fed," with sufficiency of sermons. Burton (born 1577) was of a landholding family, in Leicestershire, was educated at the grammar schools of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield, went to Brasenose, Oxford, in 1593, and got a "studentship" (the House's name for a fellowship) at Christ Church. He never married, though he professes himself not ignorant of love, and he held one living in Leicestershire, and another in Oxford. He lived to do the work that he was born to do, "The Anatomy of Melancholy," first published in 1621, with great success and with a following of later and amplified editions. He escaped the Civil War, which hit no class of men harder than the clergy, by dying in 1640.
Melancholy, we have seen, was then a literary and social fashion. Burton analysed it, reduced it to a vast number of classes or categories, explored all its causes, physical, pathological, amorous, magical (witchcraft), and "immediately from God"; all its cures, lawful and unlawful—incantation, prayer, diet, exercise; all its moral alleviations; all medical prescriptions—blood-letting, purging, herbs; everything. He made an encyclopædia of melancholy. The reader had but to ask, "What kind of melancholy is mine, amorous, worldly, witch-sent, or religious?" look up the right chapter, and forget his gloom in the huge collection of anecdotes and curious, vast, classic, medical and pleasantly useless learning. "The Anatomy" was what Thackeray called "a bedside book," but for the inconvenience of the edition in folio. The modern reader escapes trouble by using Mr. Shilleto's edition in three handy volumes. To the modern reader trouble is otherwise caused by the abundance of Latin, and by endless names of authors whom all the world has, for the most part not unjustly, forgotten.