Wither, GEORGE, poet, was born at Bentworth, Hampshire, June 11, 1588. He was sent to Magdalen College, Oxford, but after two years was called away through family reverses of fortune. At eighteen, however, he found his way to London, and entered at Lincoln's Inn, where he made fast friendship with William Browne, then of the Inner Temple. For his Abuses Stript and Whipt (1613), a very abstract satire indeed, he found himself in the Marshalsea, and here, in spite of harsh imprisonment, he wrote his Shepherds Hunting, a sweet pastoral, the fourth eclogue of which contains his famous verses on the consoling power of poetry to the poet. It is supposed that his satire addressed to the king (1614), together with the Earl of Pembroke's intercession, procured his release. In 1618 appeared The Motto, a curious piece of self-confession extending to two thousand lines, yet, says Charles Lamb, 'we read it to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost without a consciousness that we have been listening all the while to a man praising himself. There are none of the cold particles in it, the hardness and self-ends which render vanity and egotism hateful.' His finest poem, Fair Virtue, or the Mistress of Philarete (1622), with the curious inequality of all his work, shows exquisite fancy and here and there pure inspiration. His Hymns and Songs of the Church (1623) were authorised by a patent from the king, to the strong displeasure of the Stationers' Company. Accordingly they brought him no profit, although thus ushered into the world and set to music by Orlando Gibbons. His Psalms of David translated followed in 1631, his Emblems in 1634, his Hallelujah in 1641.
By this time Withers had become a fiery Puritan, and in 1642 he sold his estate to raise a troop of horse for the parliament. He was taken prisoner, and is said to have owed his life to the intercession of Sir John Denham, who pleaded with much more wit than truth that, 'so long as Wither lived, he [Denham] would not be accounted the worst poet in England.' Later Cromwell made him major-general in Surrey, and Master of the Statute Office. At the Restoration he was stripped of his places and property, and, on suspicion of having written the Vox Vulgi, a satire on the parliament of 1661, flung first into Newgate, then into the Tower. He was released in 1663, died May 2, 1667, and was buried in the church of the Savoy Hospital in the Strand.
In character Wither was sincere, resolute, no flatterer even of Cromwell, temperate, devout in all things—his pipe was a sweet solace in Newgate, and he saw God's mercy in wrapping up 'a blessing in a weed.' His books number almost a hundred, but almost all his really excellent verse belongs to the first ten years, collected in his Juvenilia (1622; enlarged 1626 and 1633; Spenser Soc., 1870-72). After his death his poetry fell into almost complete oblivion, but the praises of Southey, Sir Egerton Brydges, Hallam, and especially Charles Lamb have restored him to his true niche in the temple of fame, from which he cannot now be degraded. Pope in his Dunciad had grouped 'wretched Withers' among the dull of ancient days; Percy in his Reliques inserted one of his poems, but did not venture to give his name, and in his fourth edition (1794) describes him as 'not altogether devoid of genius.' Charles Lamb's essay on the poetical works of Wither was first printed in the collection of his own writings published in 1818. It grew out of a series of marginal notes made by him in an interleaved copy of Wither's Philarete and other poems, edited and printed by his old school-fellow John Matthew Gutch at his private press at Bristol. This volume was first lent to Lamb by Mr Gutch, next to Dr G. F. Nott, the editor of Surrey and Wyatt, and found its way once more into the hands of Lamb, who again criticised Nott's annotations with no less freedom than critical insight. The volume finally came into the possession of Mr Swinburne, who contributed a full account of it to the Nineteenth Century for January 1885.
As a religious poet Wither, in the words of Charles Lamb, reached a starry height far above Quarles, and his sweet fancy and exquisite tenderness irresistibly provoke his readers' love. His earlier poems gave him in later years pangs of unnecessary repentance. A hearty homeliness of manner, a straightforward spontaneity and honesty of speech, a resolute feeling of independence are the characteristic marks of all his work, and, as has been seen, he rises not seldom into the serene atmosphere of real poetry. But his flight is never steady or long sustained, and bathos is doubly damnable in heptasyllabic couplets. The bright little piece, 'Shall I, wasting in despair' (from Fidelia, 1615), is known to all English readers, but it is by no means his best poem.
The Hymns and Songs of the Church were edited by Edward Farr in 1856 (Spenser Soc., 1880-81), the Hallelujah in 1857 (Spenser Soc., 1878-79), and Vox Vulgi by the Rev. W. Dunn Macrae (1880). Philarete was reprinted in vol. iv. of Professor Arber's 'English Garner,' Fidelia in vol. vi. Besides those already named, the Spenser Society has reprinted the 'Miscellaneous Works' (six collections, 1871-78), Britain's Remembrancer (1879-80), the Psalms of David (1880-82), the Parallelogrammaton (1881-82), and Respublica Anglicana, or the Historie of the Parliament (1882-83).