WITHER, GEORGE, an English poet of the minor order, was born at Bentworth near Alton, in Hampshire, on the 11th of June 1588. Passing from the charge of John Greaves, the eminent master of Colemore grammar school, he entered in 1604 Magdalen College, Oxford. For some reason or other (Anthony Wood says, that it was "his geny being addicted to things more trivial"), he went home without taking his degree, after a three years' residence in the university, "to hold the plough," as he says himself in his Abuses Stript and Whipt. Having held the plough long enough, he afterwards went to London, and entered himself at one of the inns of Chancery. In 1613 he published his poetical satire on the manners of the time, entitled Abuses Stript and Whipt, which brought him into straits ; for the government, not relishing the freedom of his exposures, laid him up in the Marshalsea prison. Here he might have lain long enough, had not his Satire to the King in 1614 led to his liberation. When Wither was released, his violent passions and his unsteady judgment, coupled with his recent treatment in prison, and the sympathy which he met with from the puritanical party, made him yet more reckless than he had been before. He was loud in his denunciation of abuses, both in sober prose, and in more flowing verse. Characteristically enough, he served as captain of the horse under Charles I. ; in the spring of 1639, three years after, he was made a major for converting his estate into a troop of horse for the parliamentary army. Enthusiastic Wither was taken prisoner, however, by the royalists, and he is said to have owed his life to Sir John Denham. Regaining his liberty, he was made a justice of the peace for three counties by the Long Parliament, and major-general for the county of Surrey by Oliver Cromwell. At the Restoration he lost his liberty, being confined to Newgate, on the charge of being the author of a pamphlet called Vox Vulgi. It is doubtful how long he remained in prison, but it is certain enough that his death took place not long after his release, on the 2d of May 1667.
The list of Wither's writings, good, bad, and indifferent, fills thirteen columns of Bliss's Fasti Oxonienses. The
most complete list of them, however, in existence, is that by Thomas Park, in the British Bibliographer. From the "wretched Withers" of the Dunciad, up to the "melodious Withers" of Dr William King, there is room enough for the play of a good deal of fancy, and of a fair share of taste. Withers, in truth, possessed both taste and fancy, but his pen was much too facile, particularly in his later years. He has been long neglected, and perhaps justly. While Ellis and Campbell, and Hazlitt, have done their best to bring him into notice again, it is to be feared that he had not sufficient of "the diviner mind" to hold him in the perpetual recollection of men. Carlyle's odd characterization of this stepson of the muses, who was befriended by Thomas Westrow, one of the parliamentarians, and who has left on record in rather poor verse the kind offices of his friend, is as true as it is amusing. "Poor splayfooted dogrel," the historian of Cromwell calls it, "very poor, but very grateful, pious, true, and on the whole noble."