it is hard to discover what parts of the poem
here particularly alluded to, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, could have
occasioned the imprisonment of the author. Was Vice in High Places
more suspicious than now? had she more power; or more leisure to
listen after ill reports? That a man should be convicted of a libel
when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is
like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful
is arraigned for having "railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and
spoken contemptibly of his honorable friends, the Lord Old Man, the
Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy
could have tempted the great men of those days to appropriate such
innocent abstractions to themselves?

Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own
possible virtue. He is forever anticipating persecution and
martyrdom; fingering, as it were, the flames, to try how he can bear
them. Perhaps his premature defiance sometimes made him obnoxious to
censures which he would otherwise have slipped by.

The homely versification of these Satires is not likely to attract in
the present day. It is certainly not such as we should expect from a
poet "soaring in the high region of his fancies, with his garland and
his singing robes about him;"[1] nor is it such as
he has shown in his _Philarete_, and in some parts of his _Shepherds
Hunting_. He seems to have adopted this dress with voluntary
humility, as fittest for a moral teacher, as our divines choose sober
gray or black; but in their humility consists their sweetness. The
deepest tone of moral feeling in them (though all throughout is
weighty, earnest, and passionate) is in those pathetic injunctions
against shedding of blood in quarrels, in the chapter entitled
_Revenge_. The story of his own forbearance, which follows, is highly
interesting. While the Christian sings his own victory over Anger,
the Man of Courage cannot help peeping out to let you know, that it
was some higher principle than _fear_ which counselled this
forbearance.

[Footnote 1: Milton.]

Whether encaged, or roaming at liberty, Wither never seems to have
abated a jot of that free spirit which sets its mark upon his
writings, as much as a predominant feature of independence impresses
every page of our late glorious Burns; but the elder poet wraps his
proof-armor closer about him, the other wears his too much outwards;
he is thinking too mu