When the book before us was printed, George Wither was aged twenty-seven.  He had just stepped gingerly out of the Marshalsea Prison, and his poems reveal an amusing mixture of protest against having been put there at all and deprecation of being put there again.  Let no one waste the tear of sensibility over that shell of the Marshalsea Prison, which still, I believe, exists.  The family of the Dorrits languished in quite another place from the original Marshalsea of Wither’s time, although that also lay across the water in Southwark.  It is said that the prison was used for the confinement of persons who had spoken lewdly of dignitaries about the Court.  Wither, as we shall see, makes a great parade of telling us why he was imprisoned; but his language is obscure.  Perhaps he was afraid to be explicit.  In 1613 he had published a little volume of satires, called Abuses stript and whipt.  This had been very popular, running into six or seven editions within a short time, and some one in office, no doubt, had fitted on the fool’s cap.  Five years later the poor poet would have had a chance of being shipped straight off to Virginia, as a “debauched person”; as it was, the Marshalsea seems to have been tolerably unpleasant.  We gather, however, that he enjoyed some alleviations.  He could say, like Leigh Hunt, “the visits of my friends were the bright side of my captivity; I read verses without end, and wrote almost as many.”  The poems we have before us were written in the Marshalsea.  The book itself is very tiny and pretty, with a sort of leafy trellis-work at the top and bottom of every page, almost suggesting a little posy of wild-flowers thrown through the iron bars of the poet’s cage, and pressed between the pages of his manuscript.  Nor is there any book of Wither’s which breathes more deeply of the perfume of the fields than this which was written in the noisome seclusion of the Marshalsea.

Although the title-page assures us that these “eglogues” were written during the author’s imprisonment, we may have a suspicion that the first three were composed just after his release.  They are very distinct from the rest in form and character.  To understand them we must remember that in 1614, just before the imprisonment, Wither had taken a share with his bosom friend, William Browne, of the Inner Temple, in bringing out a little volume of pastorals, called The Shepherd’s Pipe.  Browne, a poet who deserves well of all Devonshire men, was two years younger than Wither, and had just begun to come before the public as the author of that charming, lazy, Virgilian poem of Britannia’s Pastorals.  There was something of Keats in Browne, an artist who let the world pass him by; something of Shelley in Wither, a prophet who longed to set his seal on human progress.  In the Shepherd’s Pipe Willy (William Browne) and Roget (Geo-t-r) had been the interlocutors, and Christopher Brooke, another rhyming friend, had written an eclogue under the name of Cutty.  These personages reappear in The Shepherd’s Hunting, and give us a glimpse of pleasant personal relations.  In the first “eglogue,” Willy comes to the Marshalsea one afternoon to condole with Roget, but finds him very cheerful.  The prisoner poet assures his friend that