This barren place yields somewhat to relieve,
  For I have found sufficient to content me,
  And more true bliss than ever freedom lent me;

and Willy goes away, when it is growing dark, rejoiced to find that “the cage doth some birds good.”  Next morning he returns and brings Cutty, or Cuddy, with him, for Cuddy has news to tell the prisoner that all England is taking an interest in him, and that this adversity has made him much more popular than he was before.  But Willy and Cuddy are extremely anxious to know what it was that caused Roget’s imprisonment, and at last he agrees to tell them.  Hitherto the poem has been written in ottava rima, a form which is sufficiently uncommon in our early seventeenth-century poetry to demand special notice in this case.  In a prose postscript to this book Wither tells us that the title, The Shepherd’s Hunting, which he seems to feel needs explanation, is due to the stationer, or, as we should say now, to the publisher.  But perhaps this was an afterthought, for in the account he gives to Willy and Cuddy he certainly suggests the title himself.  He represents himself as the shepherd given up to the delights of hunting the human passions through the soul; the simile seems a little confused, because he represents these qualities not as the quarry, but as the hounds, and so the story of Actaeon is reversed; instead of the hounds pursuing their master, the master hunts his dogs.  At all events, the result is that he “dips his staff in blood, and onwards leads his thunder to the wood,” where he is ignominiously captured by his Majesty’s gamekeeper.  But the allegory hardly runs upon all-fours.

The next “eglogue” represents again another visit to the prisoner, and this time Willy and Cuddy bring Alexis with them; perhaps Alexis is John Davies, of Hereford, another contributor to The Shepherd’s Pipe.  Roget starts his allegory again, in the same mild, satiric manner he had adopted, to his hurt, in Abuses stript and whipt.  Wither becomes quite delightful again, when cheerfulness breaks through this satirical philosophy, and when he tells us: 

But though that all the world’s delight forsake me, I have a Muse, and she shall music make me; Whose aery notes, in spite of closest cages, Shall give content to me and after ages.

They all felt certain of immortality, these cheerful poets of Elizabeth and James, and Prince Posterity has seen proper to admit the claim in more instances than might well have been expected.

But the delightful part of The Shepherd’s Hunting has yet to come.  With the fourth “eglogue” the caged bird begins to sing like a lark at Heaven’s gate, and it is the prisoned man—­who ought to be in doleful dumps—­that rallies his free friend Browne on his low spirits.  It is time, he says, to be merry: