very ambitious
function. It was a serious attempt to build up, as a cathedral is
built by successive architects, a great national epic, the work of
many hands. In a gloomy season of English history, in a violent age
of tyranny, fanaticism, and legalised lawlessness, it endeavoured
to present, to all whom it might concern, a solemn succession of
discrowned tyrants and law-makers smitten by the cruel laws they had
made. Sometimes, in its bold and not very delicate way, the _Mirror
for Magistrates_ is impressive still from its lofty moral tone, its
gloomy fatalism, and its contempt for temporary renown. As we read its
sombre pages we see the wheel of fortune revolving; the same motion
which makes the tiara glitter one moment at the summit, plunges it at
the next into the pit of pain and oblivion. Steadily, uniformly, the
unflinching poetasters grind out in their monotonous rime royal
how "Thomas Wolsey fell into great disgrace," and how "Sir Anthony
Woodville, Lord Rivers, was causeless imprisoned and cruelly wounded";
how "King Kimarus was devoured by wild beasts," and how "Sigeburt, for
his wicked life, was thrust from his throne and miserably slain by a
herdsman." It gives us a strange feeling of sympathy to realise that
the immense popularity of this book must have been mainly due to the
fact that it comforted the multitudes who groaned under a harsh and
violent despotism to be told over and over again that cruel kings and
unjust judges habitually came at last to a bad end.

A POET IN PRISON

THE SHEPHEARDS HUNTING: _being Certain Eglogues written during the
time of the Authors Imprisonment in the Marshalsey. By George Wyther,
Gentleman. London, printed by W. White for George Norton, and are to
be sold at the signe of the red-Bull neere Temple-barre_. 1615.

If ever a man needed resuscitation in our antiquarian times it was
George Wither. When most of the Jacobean poets sank into comfortable
oblivion, which merely meant being laid with a piece of camphor in
cotton-wool to keep fresh for us, Wither had the misfortune to be
recollected. He became a byword of contempt, and the Age of Anne
persistently called him Withers, a name, I believe, only possessed
really by one distinguished person, Cleopatra Skewton's page-boy.
Swift, in _The Battle of the Books_, brings in this poet as the
meanest common trooper that he can mention in his modern army. Pope
speaks of him with the utmost freedom as "wretched Withers." It