"As writers of verse now brought their compositions nearer to the nature of prose, the epoch was favourable to the satyrical class, for which so much food was furnished by the motley and vicious manners of the nation. Wither, therefore, bursting with indignation at the view of society which presented itself to his young mind, took this opportunity to indulge in a sort of publication, to which the prosaic taste of the times was well adapted; but he disdained, and, perhaps, felt himself unqualified, to use that glitter of false ornament, which was now substituted for the true decorations of the muse. 'I have arrived,' says he[667:A], 'to be as plain as a pack-saddle.'—'Though you understand them not, yet because you see this wants some fine phrases and
flourishes, as you find other men's writings stuffed withal, perhaps you will judge me unlearned.'—'Yet I could with ease have amended it; for it cost me, I protest, more labour to observe this plainness, than if I had more poetically trimmed it.'"[668:A]
The plainness of which Wither here professes himself to have been studious, forms one of the noblest characteristics of his best writings. Dismissing with contempt the puerilities and conceits which deformed the pages of so many of his contemporaries, he cultivated, with almost uniform assiduity, a simplicity of style, and an expression of natural sentiment and feeling, which have occasioned the revival of his choicest compositions in the nineteenth century[668:B], and will for ever stamp them with a permanent value.
Returning to his Juvenilia, we find that in 1612 he published in a thin quarto, "Prince Henrie's Obsequies; or mournfull Elegies upon his Death. With a supposed Interlocution betweene the Ghost of Prince Henry and Great Britaine;" which was followed the succeeding year by his "Epithalamia: or Nuptiall Poemes," 4to., on the marriage of Frederick the Fifth, with Elizabeth, only daughter of James the First. These pieces have been re-printed, by Sir Egerton Brydges, in his "Restituta:" the Obsequies contain forty-five elegiac sonnets, succeeded by an Epitaph, the Interlocution, and a Sonnet of Death, in Latin rhymes, with a paraphrastic translation. Among the numerous sonnet-writers of the age of Shakspeare, Wither claims a most respectable place, and many of these little elegies deserve a rescue from oblivion. We would particularly point out Nos. 14 and 17, from which an admirable sonnet might be formed by subjoining six lines of the former to the first two quatorzains of the latter, and this without
the alteration of a syllable; the octave will then consist of a soliloquy by the poet himself, and the sestain be addressed to Elizabeth the sister of Prince Henry; a transition which is productive of a striking and happy effect:—
"Thrice happy had I been, if I had kept
Within the circuit of some little Village,
In ignorance of Courts and Princes slept,
Manuring of an honest halfe-plough tillage:
Or else, I would I were as young agen