[In the following essay, Hill discusses the similarities between the political and religious views of Wither and Milton.]

George Wither was born in 1588, John Milton in 1608. Wither published all his best poetry before he was thirty-seven. He continued to write incessantly for the remaining forty-two years of his life. Milton published his first book of verse at the age of thirty-seven, and already had a few prose pamphlets to his credit. He too wrote far more in bulk thereafter, much of it in Latin, all of it of incomparably higher quality than Wither's later writings.

Wither's sad deterioration is usually attributed to his vision of himself as an inspired prophet with a message for the English people. ‘God opened my mouth’, he declared in 1641, ‘and compelled me, beyond my natural abilities, to speak.’¹ But Milton's view of his relation to his Muse in Paradise Lost is not essentially different. I want very briefly to draw attention to the many points of similarity between the political careers and the political and religious ideas of the two poets. This will do nothing to explain the greatness of Milton: but if we see how much he had in common with even the later Wither, it may help us to understand that he was no unique and lonely genius.

Wither and Milton were both self-consciously Spenserians. Milton was introduced as an imitator of Spenser in 1645; he himself told Dryden that Spenser was ‘his original’. Spenser was associated with the radical political wing in government circles, with Leicester, Walsingham, Ralegh. The Spenserian succession—Sidney, Daniel, the Fletchers, John Davies, Drayton, Browne, Wither, Milton—was also a political succession.² Many of these poets followed Spenser's example in using the conventions of pastoral poetry to make political criticisms without drawing the attention of the censor. One thinks of Britannia's Pastorals by Wither's friend Browne, of Wither's own Shepheards Hunting and Philarete, of Lycidas. After the collapse of the censorship in 1640 the vogue dies out. Wither was patronized by Southampton and the third Earl of Pembroke, who succeeded to the political attitudes and patronage of Leicester and Walsingham. Wither regularly dedicated his most controversial poems to Pembroke, who apparently came to Wither's rescue when he was in prison in 1615.³ On Pembroke's death Wither applied to the fourth Earl.

Wither went to Oxford, Milton to Cambridge. Both left ‘somewhat discontented’. But Wither, being a gentleman, proceeded to an Inn of Chancery, whilst Milton—aiming then at a clerical career—returned to Cambridge. However, both retained a considerable contempt for the university curriculum and for dons.⁴ Wither, like Milton, was no respecter of rank unaccompanied by virtue. From his earliest satires he attacked court luxury, extravagance, and corruption, purchase of offices and peerages, bribery, monopolies. Similar themes underlie Milton's pamphlets of the early 1640s, and are emphasized in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth of 1660.

But it was the international situation which really alarmed Wither from the 1620s, as it did Milton: the failure to support England's natural Protestant allies on the Continent from Habsburg attack, the sense that Protestantism was not yet secure in England. Both poets very early took up a patriotic anti-Spanish stance, which comes out in the poems which each wrote for the Fifth of November. Hence, whilst both strongly favoured toleration of all Protestants, they did not extend this to those whom they regarded as a Spanish fifth column in England or in Ireland. Both shared the Puritan desire to purge the English Church of popish remnants, and consequently abhorred the Laudian regime: Wither indeed had earlier shown considerable scepticism about bishops. This extended for both to a passionate anti-clericalism, a hatred of ambitious clergymen, of simony and the patronage system, of the state church, its tithes, its courts, its excommunications, its fees, its superstitious ceremonies and uneconomic observation of saints' days. The censorship, Wither thought, brought ‘authors, yea the whole commonwealth and all the liberal sciences into bondage’; under it, Milton agreed, ‘no free and splendid wit’ could flourish.⁵

Wither's quarrel with the Stationers' Company played a similar role in his development to the furore over Milton's divorce pamphlets. Wither wrote no Areopagitica: but long before Milton he had acquired a strong and lasting hatred of censorship as an insult to human dignity.⁶ The effects of the censorship on him can be simply shown. Between 1612 and 1628 he published sixteen works in sixteen years, the last of them—Brittans Remembrancer—printed by himself because he could not find a publisher. Between 1641 (when the censorship collapsed) and 1666 he published fifty-six works in twenty-five years. In the intervening thirteen years, the Laudian years, he published only two translations—The Psalmes of David (in the Netherlands, since he could find no English publisher) and Nemesius's The Nature of Man—together with the politically innocuous Emblemes (1635). A consistent feature of the thinking of both poets was a reasoned defence of the rights of the individual conscience, a rejection of implicit faith, of reliance on the judgement of others, and of the use of force in religious affairs.

'Tis not the cutting off of one man's ears
Will stop the voice that everybody hears,

wrote Wither after the restoration.⁷ Persecution, both came to think, was anti-christian. Like Milton in Lycidas, Wither in 1632 hoped to see God inflicting ‘that vengeance which is prepared for impenitent persecutors’.⁸

Wither disliked the ‘blind mouths’ of the clergy as much as Milton did: ‘mute as a rich clergyman’ was Wither's phrase.

To be thy shepherds wolves are stolen in …
Men use religion as a stalking-horse
To catch preferment …(9)

In his comment on Psalm 68 Wither prayed that ‘heretics, hirelings and contentious persons may be reproved and reformed or cut off’. The Miltonic ‘hirelings’ comes between two words which could give no offence to the hierarchy.¹⁰ Both Wither and Milton disliked the Laudian campaign against lecturers: Wither made the point by visualizing Jesus first expelling merchants from his church and then himself lecturing there.¹¹ ‘As if we could not pray’, he had complained in 1628, ‘until our preaching we had sent away.’¹²

Like Milton, Wither thought that the clergy and bishops (whom Charles I ‘out of the dunghill had promoted’) were largely responsible for the civil war. In 1628 he predicted, with remarkable accuracy, how the clergy would take the lead in polarizing society:

If ever in thy fields (as God forbid)
The blood of thine own children shall be shed
By civil discord, they shall blow the flame. …
One part of these will for preferment strive
By lifting up the King's prerogative
Above itself. They shall persuade him to
Much more than law or conscience bids him do
And say, God warrants it.

In reaction, others will preach

Rebellion to the people, and shall strain
The Word of God sedition to maintain.(13)

This sort of erastian anti-clericalism explains how Wither could have been a friend of Selden's, and of Milton's crony, Marchamont Nedham. It is very close to Milton's position in the mid forties.

Wither shared Milton's horror of idolatry. Both in consequence approved of iconoclasm.¹⁴ Both rejected set forms of worship (as idolatry) and indeed any state church at all. As early as 1645 Wither spoke for ‘union without uniformity’.

                                                                      God in no need stands
Either of churches, tithes or rents on lands

he declared eight years later.¹⁵

Wither deliberately cultivated a plain style in writing. It was a style at which Milton aimed only after the defeat of the Revolution. The reliance of both was on the middling sort: virtue more than compensated for humble birth. Wither favoured the sturdy independence of the ‘freeborn’, whom he contrasted with servants. Like Milton, Wither believed in human equality, but associated it with a mobile society. ‘Indiscreet and fond compassion’ for the poor could be a vice.¹⁶ When Wither like Milton in 1660 advocated ‘the just division of waste commons’, he seems to have regarded this as a means of getting rid of poor squatters.¹⁷ Both had to recognize after the civil war that ‘the rabble’ might be in favour of monarchy.¹⁸

Unlike Milton, Major Wither took an active part in the civil war fighting. But like Milton he originally accepted the leadership of the ‘Presbyterians’ in the interests of unity, though as early as 1642 he seems to have been described as an Independent.¹⁹ He soon became a supporter of the win-the-war party. His extremism is shown by his suggestion that the estates of royalist gentlemen should be confiscated, so that they should becomes peasants—‘a degree to which honest men are born; and too good for them, some of them being made lords and knights for attempting to enslave freemen’.²⁰

In 1643 Wither claimed sovereignty for Parliament (‘in whose commands the King's are best obeyed’). The doctrine that the King can do no wrong means that his ministers can be called to account. But a new note is coming in. ‘The people first did make both laws and kings’—a Leveller (and Miltonic) rather than Parliamentarian maxim.²¹ In 1645 this was made rather more specific:

                                        There is on earth a greater thing
Than an unrighteous Parliament or King.

By 1646 he was calling ominously for a purge of Parliament.²²

In the late 1640s Wither became no less disillusioned with Parliament than was Milton at the time of writing The Character of the Long Parliament. Both experienced delays and perversion of justice by Parliamentary committees. The Revolution turned out to be

                                                  A good play spoiled
And by unworthy actors foiled.(23)

In October or November 1648 Wither called for a fundamental overhaul of the Parliamentarian apparatus, and argued simultaneously against the enforced religious uniformity insisted on by the Presbyterian clergy. Like Milton in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates shortly later, Wither urged before the event the trial and execution of justice upon the King.²⁴

For Wither, as for Milton, Pride's Purge of Parliament in December 1648, the trial and condemnation of Charles I, the abolition of the House of Lords, and the proclamation of the republic seemed to offer new hope. In August 1649 he expressed unqualified jubilation at the victory of Parliament's troops in Ireland.²⁵ In 1650-1 he composed hymns to celebrate the anniversary of Charles's execution:

This is the day whereon our yoke
Of Norman bondage first was broke
And England from her chains made free.(26)

Parliament recognized the debt due to Wither and gave him a job as commissioner for sale of the King's goods.

Like Milton, Wither accepted office under the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. In 1657 he published a poem in which he declared that:

We look for such a government as shall
Make a way for Christ. …
His Highness hath made progress in a path
As far toward it as any hath
Since Christ ascended.(27)

The hyperbole is exceeded only by Milton's extraordinary statement that the events of the English Revolution were ‘the most heroic and exemplary achievements since the foundation of the world’—not excepting apparently the life and death of Christ. By his own account at least Wither was on terms of some intimacy with Cromwell, though he proved less able to influence him politically than he had hoped.²⁸ But, also like Milton, Wither did not shrink from warning the rulers of England of their failure to live up to the ideals of the Good Old Cause. Such warnings go back to 1645, when Wither spoke of the ‘avarice and ambition’ of military men, words which were often repeated by Milton later.²⁹

Again like Milton, Wither disapproved of the offer of the crown to Cromwell in 1657. He was particularly critical of Cromwell's (and Charles II's) foreign policy of alliances with papist powers; we may compare the Son of God's rejection of alliances in Paradise Regained, Book III. For Wither, like Milton, had seen the English Revolution as an opportunity for reversing Charles I's pro-papist policy and replacing it with a Protestant crusade. Both thought the Pope was Antichrist, and both believed that the end of the world and the destruction of Antichrist were approaching. Christ was ‘shortly-expected King’, whose kingdom ‘is now at hand’, foreboding ‘hasty ruin and a destruction to all tyrants’.³⁰ Wither proclaimed in 1632 that the ‘Second Coming … now draweth nigh’; ‘the worst age is come’.³¹ Like Milton later, Wither thought of the English as the chosen people; this must have affected both poets' political attitudes when the Revolution came. In 1643 Wither referred to the royalists as ‘bands and … confederates of Antichrist’; ‘his last great battery Antichrist now rears’, he wrote in 1645.³² 1666 seemed to him the likely date of the end of the world and the Second Coming; this belief was no doubt reinforced by the manifest triumph of the Beast in 1660. Like Milton again, however, Wither rejected Fifth Monarchist attempts to expedite Christ's coming by political violence.³³

In August 1659 Wither clearly saw that the restoration of monarchy was imminent, but he continued, even later than Milton, to proclaim his adherence to ‘that which is not called amiss the Good Old Cause’. Wither still asserted that:

                                                                                                                        the cause we had
Was very good, though we ourselves are bad.(34)

He shared all Milton's horror at the betrayal of the Revolution by the English people, which had led God to desert what both believed to be his cause. Milton's phrase ‘choosing them a captain back for Egypt’ has often been praised: Wither anticipated it in 1659:

They now rebelliously a captain choose
To lead them back to bondage, like the Jews.(35)

The people had been influenced by a mistaken short-run idea of their own interests, by the ‘vain and groundless apprehension that nothing but kingship can restore trade’, not by any regard for Charles II.³⁶

Like Milton, though rather earlier, Wither apparently moved from Calvinism to an undenominational Arminian position. As early as 1638 he rejected the absolute decrees.³⁷ In 1636 he insisted on free will. Without it ‘we neither husband the gifts of nature (which is God's common grace) nor endeavour as we ought to do according to that ability which we have received’. At the Fall ‘we lost indeed our light but not our eyes’. Christ would reprobate ‘those only who rejected’ the light, ‘not because they saw it not but because they loved it not’. All men ‘received … that common grace … so far forth as might have enabled them to become Sons of God’.³⁸ Nemesius, as translated by Wither, anticipated Areopagitica: ‘either man should have been made void of reason, or else being indued with reason and exercised in action, he must have in him free will’. God gave him choice, as he gave it to the angels. So man can ultimately attain

                                                                      to a state that's better
Than what he lost

—a Paradise within him, happier far. Like Milton in Areopagitica, Wither thought that knowledge can help us to recover from the consequences of the Fall. In 1662 he proclaimed free will and universal redemption.³⁹

Wither early rejected a fugitive and cloistered virtue: those who withdraw into ‘an heremetical solitariness … wrong their country and their friends’, and are ‘weak, … slothful and unjust’.

Give me the man that with a quaking arm
Walks with a stedfast mind through greatest harm;
And though his flesh doth tremble, makes it stand
To execute what Reason doth command.(40)

This is of course conventional Puritanism: trust in God and keep your powder dry. But it gives a courage in adversity that looks forward to Abdiel.

Do as you please; my way to me is known,
And I will walk it, though I walk alone.(41)

Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Wither saw it as his task to rally the defeated remnant of God's servants, to save them from despair. They must not repine at God's will as revealed in history. At Naseby, Wither had declared in 1649, God had shown himself on the side of Parliament.⁴² Now the restoration of monarchy has come as God's punishment for the English people, who had failed to take advantage of the opportunities which he had offered them. Men get the government they deserve⁴³; everything that happens is in accordance with God's will:

And he that would, and he that would not too,
Shall help effect what God intends to do. …
Yea they who pull down and they who erect
Shall in the close concur in one effect.(44)

Christopher Clobery saw in the events of 1659 fulfilment of the predictions of Brittans Remembrancer: referring to ‘these nations’, he took the Miltonic point that ‘their fall is wilful’.⁴⁵ In prison after the restoration, Wither's faith was strengthened against ‘atheistical arguments and objections of carnal men … by looking back as far as the creation’. He learnt that the restoration was ‘a trial … of … obedience to God's commands’, both for Charles II and for God's people. God ‘will provide deliverers’, but in his own time.⁴⁶ Yet Wither died before the publication of Paradise Lost. The analogies derive from the historical context.

In this light Wither's attitude towards the sects is interesting. In The Schollers Purgatory (c. 1624) he tells us that he was much wooed by the sectaries. In 1628 he mentioned Familists and Brownists without the ritually expected horror, just as Milton was to do in 1641. As early as 1623 Wither made the classic Familist distinction between ‘the history’ and ‘the mystery’, and he referred more than once to ‘the Everlasting Gospel’, a phrase used mainly by radical sectaries. In 1661 he exposed the humbug of blaming everything on to ‘fanatics’.⁴⁷ His attitude towards the Quakers resembles Milton's. Wither anticipated them in mocking at exaggerated social compliments, and took up the point again, explicitly in defence of the Quakers, in 1661.⁴⁸ He virtually aligned himself with Quakers as despised ‘messengers of God’, and spoke with admiration of their courage and of their opposition to oaths. ‘They are our Levellers new named’, he wrote—a point normally made by the Quakers' enemies.⁴⁹

Wither disliked lawyers, the delays and venality of the law, and the mumbo-jumbo of law French (‘this Norman gibberish’, Milton called it). He linked the traditional enemies of the radicals, lawyers, and priests.⁵⁰ Like Milton and most of the radicals, Wither exalted reason above precedent, experience above authority; again he expressed these points relatively early. But, again like Milton, he was prepared to plead precedent against both King and Parliament when it suited him.⁵¹

Like Milton, Wither had not much use for the Fathers of the Church, preferring to follow his own reason and conscience. Both thought that many disputed theological matters concerned things indifferent, and became increasingly concerned as such squabbles fragmented the unity of the radicals.⁵² Both accepted astrology, with reservations, but both objected to idle curiosity to prying ‘into those secrets God meant should be hidden’—for instance what God was doing before he created the world.⁵³

Like Milton, Wither thought that hell was a state of mind.⁵⁴ Milton's heresies do not appear in Wither's writings, but then we should not know about Milton's real beliefs if the unpublishable De Doctrina Christiana had not survived. The translation of Nemesius, and especially Wither's Preface, was one of the sources on which Richard Overton drew for his Mans Mortalitie of 1643. But Nemesius merely reports Hebrew views on the close union of body and soul, and that ‘man was made from the beginning neither wholly mortal neither wholly immortal’. Wither appears to reject the mortalism which Milton adopted.⁵⁵ There is likewise no evidence that Wither was anything but orthodox on the Trinity, though he emphasized the triumph of Christ's manhood at the resurrection. He recorded, without comment, that some rejected the historical Jesus Christ who died at Jerusalem.⁵⁶ He laid especial emphasis, as Milton did, on the liberty to which Sons of God might attain. For him, as for Milton, ‘the Lord's anointed’ meant the elect rather than kings.⁵⁷ But in all this there is nothing as positive as the anti-Trinitarianism to which Milton in private committed himself.

Wither perhaps approaches Milton's antinomianism. He was no strict Sabbatarian. ‘Bodily labours and exercises’ might be used on Sundays ‘wheresoever (without respect to sensual or covetous ends) a rectified conscience shall persuade us that the honour of God, the charity we owe to our neighbours or an unfeigned necessity requires them to be done’. This is exactly Milton's position in the De Doctrina Christiana.⁵⁸ Neither poet was a killjoy Puritan. The creatures exist in order to be enjoyed.⁵⁹ Like Milton in 1645, Wither thought amorous poems more suitable for youthful years; both continued to enjoy a rude story, a sexual innuendo. Wither wrote, but did not publish, a mildly naughty epithalamium.⁶⁰ Both smoked, both appear to have been betting men.⁶¹ For Wither as for Milton hypocrisy was the worst of crimes.⁶²

Wither shared Milton's high ideal of love in marriage, and rejected marriage for money and enforced virginity. Both insisted that children should choose their marriage partners, but Wither shared the contemptuous (and biblical) view that

The woman for the man was made
And not the man for her,(63)

which Milton expressed as ‘He for God only, she for God in him’; both, however, had more appreciation of the woman's point of view than most of their contemporaries. Wither's references to his own ‘dear Betty’ are touchingly affectionate and appreciative. But Wither had no occasion to discuss divorce. When he wrote, ‘Nor rob I her of aught which she can miss’, he was referring to a stolen kiss. When Milton apparently echoed the words, he was referring to male adultery.⁶⁴

Wither, ‘the English Juvenal’, was a favourite with Milton's headmaster Alexander Gil, who probably made his pupils translate him into Latin. Influences are tricky things to establish, and I should not like to claim as much as some of Wither's editors. Circe occurs in Brittans Remembrancer, Sabrina in one of Wither's epithalamia. More interesting perhaps are parallels, uses of the same imagery. They may serve to remind us how unoriginal Milton was. Wither, for instance, often refers to Sons of Belial, and echoes, ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’ more than once. The North was false for Wither in 1642 and 1660, as it was for Milton in 1648 and 1667, no doubt for political as well as biblical reasons.⁶⁵ In 1659 Wither observed that Samson (like Wither himself) could only ‘be roused up to execute God's vengeance upon the enemies of his country’ after he had suffered personal injury.⁶⁶ Professor Kermode suggested that the train of thought which led to the versification of Samson Agonistes derived from Wither's discussion of Hebrew poetry in A Preparation to the Psalter (1619).⁶⁷

A few miscellaneous coincidences. Wither, like Milton, seems to have had difficulties with his father over his choice of a poetic career: the epigram in which he explained himself foreshadows Milton's Ad Patrem.⁶⁸ Both Wither and Milton were devoted to music.⁶⁹ They shared a sturdy linguistic patriotism. Wither argued that the phrase Roman Catholic was ‘an absurd term, contradictory to itself’; Milton improved the joke, referring to ‘the Pope's bull’, ‘a particular universal’.⁷⁰ Wither admired Robert Gell, who probably married Milton to his third wife; Wither quoted Gell's views on the Second Coming.⁷¹

In Brittans Remembrancer Wither wrote:

                                                                                                    If thou forbear
What now thy conscience bids thee to declare
Thy foolish hope shall fail thee.

This passage may have been in Milton's mind when he wrote his famous words: ‘When time was, thou couldst not find a syllable of all that thou hadst read or studied to utter on her behalf’.⁷² Like Milton and many more of his contemporaries, Wither looked to later ages for the justification he had not found in his own day. Brittans Remembrancer was dedicated ‘to posterity and to these times (if they please)’. In Campo-Musae he appealed to ‘better times to come’.⁷³ In 1661, like Milton, he felt that had become an exile in his own country.⁷⁴

One conclusion to draw from the foregoing might be that the historical method cannot help us to grasp the differences between a Wither and a Milton; the similarities are so great that we have to fall back on individual genius to explain the differences. But I think we can do a little better than that. It could be argued that it was Milton's good fortune that he was just reaching the height of his poetic powers when he actively participated in ‘the most heroic and exemplary achievements since the foundation of the world’. So far from the writings of his left hand being a waste of time, it was the hopes, the illusions, of the English Revolution, culminating in the traumatic defeat of God's cause, that transformed the intended Arthuriad into Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. For Wither the equivalent experience was the plague of 1625; Brittans Remembrancer aspired to be his Paradise Lost, justifying God's ways to men. There are powerful passages in the poem, but the event—or rather Wither's reaction to the event—would not carry the burden which he laid on it. The plague shocked and horrified Wither, but his personal involvement extended no further than to a self-righteous satisfaction that he had not fled from the City as other men did. His main concern was to use the tragedy to denounce the sins of others in a wholly traditional manner. Even when Wither recalls Marvell's ‘double heart’, his expression of it is flat:

But, oh my God! though grovelling I appear
Upon the ground, and have a rooting here,
Which hauls me downward, yet in my desire
To that which is above me I aspire.(75)

Milton, on the other hand, was totally involved in the Revolution, and felt a share in the guilt of the English people which had led God to desert his own cause. Milton's whole position, after twenty years of effort and self-sacrifice, was in ruins and had to be reconstructed, rethought, and refelt. Wither too experienced disillusionment and defeat, he too was arrested, imprisoned, and suffered financial loss at the restoration, and he too admitted his own share in ‘our national demerits’.⁷⁶ But Wither had his glib explanation ready-made: sin, which Wither had been denouncing for forty years. Milton arrived at a theologically similar conclusion, but after travelling through hell and heaven to find it.

Notes

1. G. Wither, Hallelujah, ed. E. Farr (1857), p. xxiv; cf. pp. xxxi, 384-6; Vox Pacifica (1645), pp. 10-12, 32 ff.; Epistolium-Vagum-Prosa-Metricum (1659), p. 28; Parallelogrammaton (1662), p. 30; Ecchoes from the Sixth Trumpet (1666), p. 98. (Whenever possible I quote Wither from the Spenser Society reprints, but cite the page number of the original edition where this is given.)

2. See my Milton and the English Revolution (1977), pp. 19, 50, 59-64.

3. I owe this point to Margot Heinemann. For Pembroke's role as patron of opposition writers see her ‘Middleton's A Game at Chess: Parliamentary Puritans and Opposition Drama’, in English Literary Renaissance, 5 (1975), 232-50.

4. Wither, Juvenilia, i. 2-5, 175-82; ii. 319-20.

5. Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 19, 154.

6. Wither, Juvenilia, iii. 630-3; The Schollers Purgatory (?1624), passim; Brittans Remembrancer (1628), sig. B2, p. 287. F. S. Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776 (Illinois University Press, 1952), p. 132. The Schollers Purgatory may have been published abroad.

7. Wither, A Proclamation in the Name of the King of Kings (1662), p. 68.

8. The Psalmes of David (The Netherlands, 1632), p. 180; cf. Juvenilia, i. 93; Hallelujah, pp. 76-7; Vox Pacifica (1645), p. 141; Prosopopaeia Britannica (1648), pp. 90, 95-6, and passim; Westrow Revived (1653), p. 10; Speculum Speculativum (1660), pp. 125-6; Parallelogrammaton (1662), pp. 100-1.

9. Juvenilia, ii. 436; Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 244-5; cf. p. 191.

10. The Psalmes of David, ii. 141.

11. The Hymnes and Songs of the Church (1623). I quote from the edition of E. Farr (1856), p. 194.

12. Brittans Remembrancer, p. 247; cf. pp. 244-55, passim.

13. Ibid., pp. 262-3.

14. Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 133-4; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 111, 117; Salt upon Salt (1659), pp. 24-5; Milton, Eikonoklastes, passim.

15. Vox Pacifica, p. 145; Westrow Revived, p. 56; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 109, 117, 125; Three Private Meditations (1666), pp. 46-8.

16. Juvenilia, i. 19-20, 131, 265-6; ii. 436-8, 478-9; iii. 625-30, 691-2, 719-29, 733-4, 776-7; Hymnes and Songs, p. 231; Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 10-11, 117, cf. p. 248; Hallelujah, p. xxviii. Cf. Milton, Complete Prose Works (Yale edn.), iv. 271.

17. Wither, Fides-Anglicana (1660), pp. 52-4; cf. Milton, Works (Columbia edn.), xviii. 6-7.

18. Wither, Prosopopaeia Britannica (1648), pp. 47-8; Epistolium-Vagum-Prosa-Metricum (1659), p. 20; Milton, Complete Prose Works, iv. 635.

19. Wither, Reasons humbly offered in justification of an order granted to Major George Wither (1642), p. 4.

20. Wither, The Speech Without Doore (1644), p. 5; The Two Incomparable Generalissimos of the World (1644), single sheet.

21. Wither, Campo-Musae (1643), pp. 8, 10-11, 33, 44-6, 49-50, 63-4; cf. Tuba Pacifica (1664), p. 20.

22. Vox Pacifica, p. 213; Opobalsamum Anglicanum (1646), p. 9.

23. Wither, Amygdala Britannica (1647), p. 9.

24. Prosopopaeia Britannica, passim.

25. Wither, Carmen Eucharisticon (1649), passim.

26. Wither, Three Grains of Spirituall Frankincense (1651), p. 9. For Wither's acceptance of the radical theory of the Norman Yoke see further Campo-Musae, p. 47, and Speculum Speculativum (1660), p. 58. For Milton see my Milton and the English Revolution, p. 100.

27. Wither, A Suddain Flash (1657), p. 16.

28. Milton, Complete Prose Works, iv. 549; Wither, A Cordial Confection, in W. M. Clyde, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press from Caxton to Cromwell (Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 338-42.

29. Wither, Vox Pacifica, p. 196; Prosopopaeia Britannica, pp. 58-71; Westrow Revived, pp. 70-2, Vaticinium Causuale (1655), pp. 8, 14-16.

30. Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 706-7; iii. 210, 256, 316, 536, 598-9. Milton held these views in 1649 no less than in 1641, Wither in 1612 no less than in 1662 (Prince Henries Obsequies, 1612; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 48-58).

31. The Psalmes of David, ii. 184, 145; cf. Campo-Musae, pp. 25, 66, 68; Westrow Revived, pp. 54-5; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 98, 123, 137.

32. Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 18, 22, 24; Campo-Musae, p. 64; Vox Pacifica, p. 68.

33. A Suddain Flash, p. 16; Epistolium-Vagum, p. 25.

34. Furor-Poeticus (1660), pp. 19-20; cf. Vox Vulgi (1661), p. 17. I quote from the reprint of 1880, ed. W. D. Macray.

35. Epistolium-Vagum, pp. 24-5; Speculum Speculativum (1660), pp. 42-3, 69-75; Milton, Works (Columbia edn.), vi. 149.

36. Speculum Speculativum, pp. 81-3.

37. Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 39-40, 52-9, 249-52; cf. The Psalmes of David, ii. 168, 303-4.

38. Nemesius, The Nature of Man, Englished by George Wither (1636), sig. A3-5. William Haller noted the importance of this passage (Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution, Columbia University Press, 1955, p. 177).

39. Nemesius, op. cit., pp. 568-9; Wither, Vaticinia Poetica (1666), p. 27; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 61-5; cf. Juvenilia, i. 263-4; Milton, Complete Prose Works, ii. 366-7.

40. Juvenilia, i. 281; Brittans Remembrancer, p. 62, cf. pp. 286-7.

41. Campo-Musae, pp. 64-5; cf. Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 13, 44, 54, 59-72, 78, 82, 98-9; Opobalsamum Anglicanum, p. 6.

42. Carmen Eucharisticon (1649).

43. Epistolium-Vagum, pp. 16, 19-23, 29; Vox Vulgi, pp. 25, 35.

44. Wither, The Dark Lantern, pp. 18-19.

45. J. M. French, ‘Thorn-Dury's Notes on Wither’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 22 (1959-60), pp. 386-8. A glance at Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 245-52, will show how right Clobery was. Cf. Juvenilia, i. 49-52.

46. Parallelogrammaton, pp. 46, 68-70, 74; cf. pp. 28, 38, 45.

47. Brittans Remembrancer, p. 247; cf. p. 50; Hymnes and Songs, p. liii; Vox Vulgi, p. 19; Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 783-8, ii. 178.

48. Hymnes and Songs, p. xxxvii; The Prisoners Plea (1661), p. 27.

49. Speculum Speculativum, pp. 51-2; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 43-4, 88-93; Vaticinia Poetica, pp. 10-12.

50. Juvenilia, i. 198-200; Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 30, 107, 129, 186-9; Speculum Speculativum, p. 67.

51. Juvenilia, iii. 679-80, 700; Brittans Remembrancer, pp. 234-6; Vox Vulgi, pp. 14, 30; Parallelogrammaton, p. 101.

52. Juvenilia, iii. 679; Carmen Expostularium (1647), passim; Ecchoes from the Sixth Trumpet, p. 19. Cf. Milton and the English Revolution, pp. 199, 212, 369.

53. Brittans Remembrancer, p. 47; Juvenilia, i. 300-1. Cf. Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 293, 319-20; Paradise Lost, viii. 188-97, Paradise Regained, Bk. IV.

54. Wither, Meditations upon the Lords Prayer (1665), p. 96.

55. Nemesius, op. cit., pp. 23-6, 82-93; cf. pp. 242-3; Westrow Revived, p. 37.

56. Hymnes and Songs, pp. 206-7; Hallelujah, pp. 244-6; Ecchoes from the Sixth Trumpet, p. 121.

57. The Psalmes of David, ii. 246; Preface to Nemesius, op. cit., sig. A5; Fides-Anglicana, p. 22.

58. Hymnes and Songs, p. 216; Emblemes, ii. 15, iv. 26; Parallelogrammaton, pp. 49-56; Milton, Complete Prose Works, vi. 353-4, 537-41, 639-40, 708-14.

59. Hallelujah, p. 45.

60. Juvenilia, i. 236-42, 258-62; Milton, Prolusion VI, Defensio Secunda, passim; French, ‘Thorn-Dury's Notes on Wither’, pp. 383-5.

61. Wither, An Improvement of Imprisonment (1661), pp. 98-100. Contrast the diatribe against tobacco in Juvenilia, i. 222-4—written perhaps with an eye on James I. For betting see Juvenilia, iii. 751; Brittans Remembrancer, p. 4; Milton and the English Revolution, p. 59.

62. Brittans Remembrancer, p. 19; Campo-Musae, p. 66; Westrow Revived, p. 8 (‘Hypocrisy / Is worse than error’); Furor-Poeticus, p. 43; Vox Vulgi, p. 17; Paradise Lost, iii. 682-5, iv. 121-2, 744-7.

63. Juvenilia, ii. 480-3; Hallelujah, pp. 309-19; Parallelogrammaton, p. 34.

64. An Improvement of Imprisonment (1661), pp. 81-8, 92-5, 105-7, 120; A Memorandum to London (1665), p. 72; Juvenilia, iii. 920; Milton, Complete Prose Works, ii. 674.

65. Campo-Musae, p. 52; Furor-Poeticus, p. 24.

66. Epistolium-Vagum, pp. 23, 27.

67. F. Kermode, ‘Samson Agonistes and Hebrew Prosody’, Durham University Journal, New Series 14 (1952), pp. 59-63.

68. Juvenilia, ii. 361-3.

69. Emblemes, ii. 3. We have Percy Scholes's authority for Wither's keen interest in and competent knowledge of music (The Puritans and Music, Oxford University Press, London, 1934, p. 156). Scholes referred especially to A Preparation to the Psalter.

70. Juvenilia, i. 22; Parallelogrammaton, p. 105; Three Private Meditations (1665), p. 46; Milton, Works (Columbia edn.), vi. 167.

71. Ecchoes from the Sixth Trumpet, pp. 8-9.

72. Brittans Remembrancer, p. 7; Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 804.

73. Campo-Musae, pp. 2, 48; cf. Milton, Works (Columbia edn.), vi. 100.

74. An Improvement of Imprisonment, p. 101; Milton, Works (Columbia edn.), xii. 113-15.

75. Emblemes, iv. 1.

76. Furor-Poeticus, pp. 19-20; Vox Vulgi, p. 17.