Thy arts are catching; cozen Satan too; We may notice that in one of his prose pieces The Character of a London Diurnal,' Cleveland introduces other personal peculiarities of Cromwell besides his fiery nasal organ. "This Cromwell," he observes, "is never so valorous as when he is making speeches for the Association; which, nevertheless, he doth, somewhat ominously, with his neck awry, holding up his ear as if he expected Mahomet's pigeon to come and prompt him. He should be a bird of prey, too, by his bloody beak ;" &c. It is probable enough that this attitude of one threading a needle, or trying to look round a corner, may have been customary with Cromwell in speaking at the early date to which the description refers, as it appears to have been with his sect in general: in another poem Cleveland depicts the Puritan preacher as With face and fashion to be known For one of sure election; With eyes all white, and many a groan; WITHER. These last mentioned writers-Carew, Lovelace, Suckling, Denham, and Cleveland-were all, as we have seen, cavaliers; but the cause of puritanism and the parliament had also its poets as well as that of love and loyalty. Of these the two most eminent were Marvel and Wither. Marvel's era, however, is rather after the Restoration. George Wither, who was born in 1588, covers nearly eighty years of the seventeenth century with his life, and not very far from sixty with his works : his first publication, his volume of satires entitled 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' having appeared in 1611, and some of his last pieces only a short time before his death in 1667. The entire number of his separate works, as they have been reckoned up by modern bibliographers, exceeds a hundred. Two songs or short poems of Wither's inserted by Percy in his Reliques*—the one beginning Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman's fair? Be she fairer than the day, Or the flowery meads in May; What care I how fair she be? -the other, entitled 'The Stedfast Shepherd,' an exquisitely graceful as well as high-thoughted carol, first recalled attention to this forgotten writer; his high merits were a few years afterwards more fully illustrated by Mr. Octavius Gilchrist in the Gentleman's Magazine; and he was subsequently made more widely known by the specimens of him given by Ellis,―among the rest the passage of consummate beauty (previously quoted by Gilchrist) from his Shepherd's Hunting, published in 1615, while he was confined in the Marshalsea, in which, breaking out into what we may call a hymn or pæan of gratitude and affection, he recounts all that Poetry and his Muse still were and had ever been to him : In my former days of bliss Her divine skill taught me this,— Vol. iii. pp. 190 and 264. That from every thing I saw Make this churlish place allow The dull loneness, the black shade, She hath taught me by her might Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee; Though thou be to them a scorn That to nought but earth are born; Let my life no longer be Than I am in love with thee. Though our wise ones call thee madness, Let me never taste of gladness If I love not thy maddest fits Thou dost teach me to contemn What makes knaves and fools of them. One excellence for which all Wither's writings are eminent, his prose as well as his verse, is their genuine English. His unaffected diction, even now, has scarcely a stain of age upon it, but flows on, ever fresh and transparent, like a pebbled rill. As a specimen of his clear and easy narrative style, we will transcribe a few passages from the Introduction to his 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' in which, by way of explaining the occasion of the work, he relates the history of his life to that date. After telling us that he had been well grounded at school in the Latin and Greek grammar, he proceeds to give an account of his first experience of Oxford : It is the spring of knowledge, that imparts It is the very nursery of wits. There once arrived, 'cause my wits were raw, The palaces and temples that were due To have my time there vain and idly spent, |