The letter above given was unknown to the editor of Mr. Pickering’s edition.

J.E.B.  MAYOR.

Marlborough College.

[Footnote 2:  The printed copy has Trinity College.]

* * * * *

MISTAKE ABOUT GEORGE WITHER.

In Campbell’s Notices of the British Poets (edit. 1848 p. 234.) is the following, passage from the short memoir of George Wither:—­

“He was even afraid of being put to some mechanical trade, when he contrived to get to London, and with great simplicity had proposed to try his fortune at court.  To his astonishment, however, he found that it was necessary to flatter in order to be a courtier.  To show his independence, he therefore wrote his Abuses Whipt and Stript, and, instead of rising at court, was committed for some months to the Marshalsea.”

The author adds a note to this passage, to which Mr. Peter Cunningham (the editor of the edition to which I refer) appends the remark inclosed between brackets:—­

“He was imprisoned for his Abuses Whipt and Stript; yet this could not have been his first offence, as an allusion is made to a former accusation. [It was for The Scourge (1615) that his first known imprisonment took place.]”

I cannot discover upon any authority sufficient ground for Mr. Campbell’s note resecting a former accusation against Wither.  He was undoubtedly imprisoned for his Abuses Whipt and Stript, which first appeared in print in 1613, but I do not think an earlier offence can be proved against him.  It has been supposed, upon the authority of a passage in the Warning Piece to London, that the first edition of this curious work appeared in 1611; but I am inclined to think that the lines,—­

  “In sixteen hundred ten and one,
  I notice took of public crimes,”

refers to the period at which the “Satirical Essays” were composed.  Mr. Willmott, however (Lives of the Sacred Poets, p. 72.), thinks that they point to an earlier publication.  But it is not likely that Wither would so soon again have committed himself by the publication of the Abuses in 1613, if he had suffered for his “liberty of speech” so shortly before.

Mr. Cunningham’s addition to Mr. Campbell’s note is incorrect.  The Scourge is part of the Abuses Whipt and Stript printed in 1613 (a copy of which is now before me), to which it forms a postscript.  Wood, who had never seen it, speaks of it as a separate publication; but Mr. Willmott has corrected this error, although he had only the means of referring to the edition of the Abuses printed in 1615.  Mr. Cunningham’s note, that Wither was imprisoned for the Scourge in 1615, is a mistake; made, probably, by a too hasty perusal of Mr. Willmott’s charming little volume on our elder sacred poets.