769 



WITHER, GEORGE. 



WITHERING, WILLIAM. 



Til 



the Remains of an Animal belonging to the genus Bos.' In 1812 he 

 published, in 2 vols. 8vo, ' A System of Anatomy,' a work embracing 

 the subjects, anatomical and physiological, which constituted his 

 course of lectures in the college. He was very successful as a teacher, 

 and hia lectures were always well attended. He died on the 22nd of 

 January 1818, of a fever which he caught during his professional 

 duties. 



WITHER, or WYTHER (sometimes improperly WITHERS), 

 GEORGE, was born June llth, 1588, at Bentworth, near Alton in 

 Hampshire, and was the only son of George Wither of Bentworth, 

 who was himself the second son (the first by a second wife), of John 

 Wither, Esq., of Manydowne, near Wotton-St.-Lawrence, in that 

 county. The name of Wither's mother was Anne Serle. After re- 

 ceiving the usual instruction at the grammar-school of Colemore, or 

 Colemere, under its eminent master, John Greaves, he was sent about 

 1604 to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had for his tutor Dr. 

 John Warner, afterwards bishop of Rochester. After remaining how- 

 ever about three years, he was called Lome without having taken a 

 degree, as he himself tells us (in his ' Abuses Stript and Whipt'), " to 

 hold the plough." Anthony Wood says that " his geny- being addicted 

 to things more trivial " than the studies pursued at the university, he 

 went to London and entered himself first at one of the inns of Chan- 

 cery, afterwards at Lincoln's Inn. " But," continues Wood, " still his 

 geny hanging after things more smooth and delightful, he did at length 

 make himself known to the world (after he had taken several rambles 

 therein) by certain specimens of poetry ; which being dispersed in 

 several hands, [he] became shortly after a public author, and much 

 admired by some in that age for his quick advancement in that 

 faculty." Some pieces of less pretension had already made his name 

 known in a limited circle, when in 1613 he published his volume of 

 poetical satires on the manners of the time, entitled * Abuses Stript and 

 Whipt.' For some things in this production which gave offence to the 

 government he was committed (it is not stated by what authority) to 

 the Marshalsea prison, and lay there for several months. While in 

 confinement he wrote and published his ' Satire to the King,' 1614, in 

 which he complains bitterly of the injustice of his detention, and 

 which is supposed to have procured his release. The spirit of his 

 poetry and the usage he had met with now made him a great favourite 

 with the puritanical party, by whom, Wood states, he was much " cried 

 up for his profuse pouring-forth of English rhyme." Afterwards, it is 

 added, " the vulgar sort of people " came to regard his poetry as having 

 in it something prophetical. He denounced the abuses of the times 

 too in various prose pamphlets as well as in his more frequent dis- 

 charges of flowing verse. All this while he appears to have lived in 

 easy circumstances on the landed property which he had inherited. 

 But, as might have been expected in so hot and restless a spirit, Wither, 

 as soon as the storm of the civil war began to blow, hastened to throw 

 himself into the scene of commotion and excitement at first, as it 

 would appear, without much minding which side or what principles 

 he fought for. He served as a captain of horse, and quarter-master- 

 general of his regiment, in the expedition which Charles I. led against 

 the Scotch Covenanters in the spring of 1639 (also, it may be noted, 

 the first campaign of the cavalier-poet Lovelace). Three years after, 

 when the war began between the king and his English subjects, Wither 

 sold his estate and raised a troop of horse for the Parliament, in whose 

 army he was speedily promoted to the rank of major. On his colours, 

 we are told, he carried the motto, ' Pro Rege, Lege, Grege.' Being 

 taken prisoner by the royalists, he is said to have been indebted for 

 his life to a bon-mot of Sir John Denham : " Denham," says Wood, 

 " some of whose estates at Egham in Surrey Wither had got into his 

 clutches, desired his Majesty not to hang him, because, so long as 

 Wither lived, he (Denham) would not be accounted the worst poet in 

 England." He also probably soon recovered his liberty. Not long 

 after this, Wood tells us, " he was constituted by the Long Parliament 

 a justice of peace in quorum for Hampshire, Surrey, and Essex, which 

 office he kept six years, and afterwards was made by Cromwell major- 

 general of all the horse and foot in the county of Surrey, in which 

 employment he licked hia fingers sufficiently, gaining thereby a great 

 odium from the generous royalists." A manuscript note on a copy of 

 one of his tracts in the British Museum, his ' Boni Ominis Votum,' 

 printed in 1656, describes him as "lately made master of the statute 

 office.'' 



At the Restoration, Wither was not only forced to disgorge all this 

 spoil, but was by a vote of the Convention Parliament sent to Newgate 

 on the charge of being the author of a publication entitled 'Vox 

 Vulgi,' which was regarded as a scandalous and seditious libel. There 

 is extant a 12mo pamphlet which he published in 1661, entitled ' The 

 Prisoner's Plea humbly offered in a Remonstrance, with a Petition 

 annexed, to the Commons in parliament assembled, by G. Wyther, 

 falsely charged to have composed a libel against the said Commons, 

 and therefore now a prisoner in Newgate ;' but Wood asserts that he 

 afterwards confessed himself the author of the obnoxious publication, 

 upon which he was committed a close prisoner to the Tower, with 

 orders that he should be debarred the use of pen, ink, and paper, and 

 at the same time an impeachment was ordered to be drawn up against 

 him. The impeachment does not appear to have been proceeded 

 with; and he even contrived, by the connivance of the keeper, to 

 write and to send to the press from time to time sundry pieces both 



BIOG. DIV. VOL. VI. 



in verse and in prose. It is not known when he was released : Wood 

 says that he lay in the Tower three years and more ; Aubrey's account 

 is, that his imprisonment lasted about three-quarters of a year ; it is 

 certain however that he had obtained his liberty some years before his' 

 death, which took place on the 2nd of May 1667. He was buried, 

 says Aubrey, " within the east door of the Savoy Church, where he 

 died." He had married, the game authority states, Elizabeth, eldest 

 daughter of H. Emerson, of South Lambeth : " she was," Aubrey 

 adds, " a great wit, and would write in verse too." It appears that a 

 grandson of Wither's, Hunt Wither, of Fidding, in the county of 

 Southampton, designating himself colonel of foot in her majesty's 

 army, and brigadier-general in the service of Charles III. of Spain, 

 was alive in 1709. But his paternal estate of Bentworth had latterly 

 come into the possession of an heir female, and was a few years ago 

 held by Mr. Bigg Wither, who in consequence had taken the old 

 family name. (See 'Memoir of Wither,' in 'British Bibliographer,' 

 vol. i,, pp. 1-18, published in 1810.) Anthony Wood characteristically 

 rounds off his account of Wither with the critical remark that " the 

 things that he hath written and published are very many, accounted 

 by the generality of scholars as mere scribbles.' 1 The list of his works 

 fills about 13 columns in Dr. Bliss's edition of the ' Fasti Oxoniensis. 1 

 But the most detailed catalogue of them is that contributed to the 

 'British Bibliographer' by the late Mr. Thomas Park ; it includes 112 

 articles (among which however are some not known to have been 

 printed), and extends over vol. i., pp. 179-205, 305-332, 417-440, and 

 vol. ii., pp. 17-32, 378-391. Various bibliographical notices relating to 

 Wither are also to be found in the pages of the ' Restituta ' and the 

 ' Censura Literaria.' 



Some of Wither's religious verses continued to be printed for some 

 time after the commencement of the last century, but were in request 

 no doubt more for their devotional than their tioetical qualities. The 

 estimation in which he was then held as a poet may be gathered from 

 the contemptuous mention of him by Pope in the 'Dunciad ' (book i. 

 296 ; see also the note on v. 146) 



" Safe, where no critics damn, no duns molest, 

 Where -wretched Withers, Ward, and Gildon rest." 



Swift has also spoken of him in similar terms (in an unlucky passage 

 however in which he couples him with Dryden). Even Bishop Percy, 

 long after this time, in publishing one of Wither's short pieces in the 

 first (1765) edition of his 'Reliques,' vol. iii., p. 120, does not venture 

 to prefix the author's name : " This beautiful old song," he merely says, 

 " is given from a very ancient copy in the editor's folio MS." So also 

 in the case of another fragment at p. 253. And even in the subse- 

 quent editions of the work his admiration of Wither is very cautiously 

 expressed. In the fourth edition (1794), the last he superintended, he 

 speaks of him as merely " not altogether devoid of genius " (vol. iii., 

 p. 190). Long before this indeed, in the poem entitled ' Bibliotheca,' 

 published in 1712, the author, supposed to be Dr. William King, 

 mentions him with the epithet of " melodious Wither ; " and seems to 

 intimate that he bad still a sort of reputation among poetical anti- 

 quaries. One of the first persons who expressed a cordial appreciation 

 of the merits of Wither's poetry was the late Mr. Octavius Gilchrist 

 in a Life of him which he communicated to the 70th volume of the 

 'Gentleman's Magazine,' published in 1797. Since then ample justice 

 has been done to this long neglected writer by the late Mr. George 

 Ellis, in the second edition of his ' Specimens of Early English 

 Poetry' (1801) ; by Mr. Thomas Campbell, in his 'Specimens of the 

 British Poets' (1819); by the late Mr. Hazlitt, in his 'Lectures on 

 English Poetry ' (1818) ; and especially by the late Sir Egerton 

 Brydges, in the ' Restituta,' the ' Censura Literaria,' the British Biblio- 

 grapher,' and other publications ; and there have been many reprints 

 of his poetry or portions of it. 



Wither's poetry is of very unequal excellence, and a good deal of it 

 is worthless enough. His fatal facility, which grew upon him as he 

 advanced in life, and soon debased his style from freedom to sloven- 

 liness, has left nearly everything he has done weak and unfinished in 

 some part or other. But there was in him a true poetic genius, a 

 quick and teeming invention, a universal sympathy, a fancy that could 

 gild any subject, or " make a sunshine," like Spenser's Una, " in the 

 shadiest place;" above all, a natural love of truth and simplicity, 

 which, whatever else may be sometimes wanting, has put a life and 

 enduring freshness into all that he has written. His earliest style is 

 his happiest; in that he seems to have sought by art and pains for the 

 directness and transparency for which he afterwards trusted mostly to 

 negligence or chance ; latterly also he took, apparently from design, 

 to a greater harshness both of phraseology and rhythm ; but, both in 

 his verse and in his prose, his English is rarely without the charm of 

 great ease and clearness, as well as idiomatic vigour. 



WITHERING, WILLIAM, was born in 1741, at Wellington in 

 Shropshire, where his father was a surgeon-apothecary in considerable 

 practice. He received his early education at a school in his native 

 place, and commenced his medical education under his father's 

 instruction. After spending the usual preliminary time with his 

 father, he was sent to complete his medical education at Edinburgh, 

 in the university of which place he took his degree of Doctor of 

 Medicine in 1766. He commenced the practice of his profession at 

 Stafford, where he married ; but not succeeding, he removed to Bir- 



