Withering

“ One consolation remains, that in your experiments you cannot fail of discovering something perhaps of as great or greater importance for us to know.”
Nevertheless, even in the Club itself there was at least one man who came under the influence of Priestley, but who eventually emancipated himself, and this was Withering, who, we are informed, read to them “a humorous piece in verse entitled ‘The Life and Death of Phlogiston,’ which was long remembered for its clever treatment and pointed wit.” ”

“ Perhaps Witherings has met with it again; if he have, my comfort is that no better fortune [Pg 177] will befall him in that than usually does to harkeners, who never hear good of themselves; yet, methinks, since the House of Parliament were more noble than to countenance him in his last unworthiness of that kind, he should not have much courage to do it again." In another letter the same writer says: "I think your honour will have very uncertain dealing from Mr. Witherings, for in all his affairs he appears so." ”

“ From the conflicting statements made in regard to Witherings during the course of his official life, it is perhaps now impossible to arrive at any true estimate of his character. He lived in a troublous time, surrounded by enemies covetous of his office, and during a period of civil war, when to steer a course free from strife and collision would be impossible. He must have been a man of originality and of persevering disposition. ”

“ I had no sooner told this tale, but Sir Henry Witherington did acknowledge himself to be the man that I had given the loaf unto two and twenty years before, where I found the proverb true, that men have more privilege than mountains in meeting. ”

“ Later.—I am unspeakably delighted with the urbanity (on the whole) with which I have been cross-examined. For, to my wonderment, Witherington, Q.C., commenced with displaying a respectful and sympathetic interest in my career, &c., which rendered me completely at my ease, and though on occasions he did suddenly manifest inquisitorial severity, I soon discovered that his anger was mere wind from a tea-pot, and that he was in secret highly gratified by the nature of my replies. ”

“ Who dies in Christ he dies not but to live.
In Christo mori est vivere.
Obiit Anno. Dni. 1651, Ætat. Suæ 55."
In Memories of Old Romford, it is stated that Witherings was a Puritan; in any case his profession in later life seems to have been that of a Protestant. It may be that the charge of being a papist in his earlier years was but a base invention of his enemies. Reference has previously been made to a suggestion that Witherings had been a mercer in London in his earlier life. ”

“ A poor tongue-tied devil of a chap whom I regard with pity!
Witherington, Q.C., is addressing the jury. He is not a tongue-tied, but he speaks in a colloquial, commonplace sort of fashion which does not shed a very brilliant lustre upon boasted British advocacy.
Though of an unromantic obesity, it appears from the excessive eulogies he lavishes upon Jessimina that he is already the tangled fly in the web of her feminine enchantments. What a pity that such a prominent barrister should be so unskilled in seeing through such a millstone as the female heart! ”

“ Mr Witherington’s whole character might be summed up in two words—eccentricity and benevolence: eccentric he certainly was, as most bachelors usually are. Man is but a rough pebble without the attrition received from contact with the gentler sex: it is wonderful how the ladies pumice a man down to a smoothness which occasions him to roll over and over with the rest of his species, jostling but not wounding his neighbours, as the waves of circumstances bring him into collision with them. ”

“ Witherington and his companions in death were the first to whom these exhortations were given; and as the design is truly benevolent, and as they are often fraught with incalculable blessings to the guilty, we will gratify our readers by the insertion of them, and with this close the life of Witherington. ”

“ Witherington having pulled the bell again, fell into a brown study.
Mr. Jonathan, the butler, made his appearance; but observing that his master was occupied, he immediately stopped at the door, erect, motionless, and with a face as melancholy as if he was performing mute at the porch of some departed peer of the realm; for it is an understood thing, that the greater the rank of the defunct the longer must be the face, and, of course, the better must be the pay. ”

“ When my suspicions were first roused after signing the assurance, and I asked of Captain Minchin how he had prevailed upon Captain Witherington to make his returns so promptly, he told me with the greatest coolness in the world that Witherington had failed to send in any accounts at all, so that he himself had done his best to estimate what we ought to have in hand, and had assured us of possessing it.”
“Witherington ought to be hanged!” says Mr Freyne.
“Indeed, sir,” says Mr Holwell, “the poor gentleman is a most laborious, active creature. ”

“ Witherington being at Newcastle, put up at an inn where some commissioners were to meet that day, to make choice of a schoolmaster for a neighboring parish. The salary being very handsome, many spruce young clergymen and students appeared as competitors: and, being possessed of sufficient qualifications, Witherington bethought him of standing a candidate, for which purpose he borrowed coarse, plain clothes from the landlord, to make his appearance correspond with the conduct he meant to pursue. ”

“ Witherington met you and demanded your charity.” After a good deal of expostulation, the dean, terrified at the sight of a pistol, delivered to Witherington a purse containing fifty guineas, before he pursued his journey to Carlisle, and our adventurer set off in search of more prey. ”

“ Witherington, unfolding the letter.
“Yes, sir, a long while; tempus fugit,” replied the butler in a low tone, half shutting his eyes.
“I hope to God no accident has happened,” continued Mr. Witherington: “my poor little cousin and her twins e’en now that I speak, they may be all at the bottom of the sea.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the butler; “the sea defrauds many an honest undertaker of his profits.”
“By the blood of the Witheringtons! I may be left without an heir, and shall be obliged to marry, which would be very uncomfortable.”
“Very little comfort,” echoed Jonathan—“my wife is dead. ”

“ IV. From this union Mr. Witherington had issue: first, a daughter, christened Moggy, whom we shall soon have to introduce to our readers as a spinster of forty-seven; and second, Antony Alexander Witherington, Esquire, whom we just now have left in a very comfortable position, and in a very brown study. [Pg 13]
Mr. Witherington senior persuaded his son to enter the banking-house, and, as a dutiful son, he entered it every day: but he did nothing more, having made the fortunate discovery that 'his father was born before him' ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quarles thinks of his audience when he lectures; Wither soliloquises in company with a full heart.’ In an essay on ‘The Poetical Works of George Wither’ (published in Lamb's ‘Works’ in 1818) he expressed unbounded faith in his poetic greatness. It is now universally recognised that Wither was a poet of exquisite grace, although only for a short season in his long career. Had his last work been his ‘Faire Virtue,’ he would have figured in literary history in the single capacity of a fascinating lyric poet. ”

“ George Wither was born at Brentworth, 1588. He went to Magdalene College, Oxford. He led a troop of Royalist horse against the Covenanters, but three years later he became a Puritan and held command in Cromwell’s army. He was imprisoned during the Restoration for a time. He died in 1667. Wither wrote, besides his poems, a volume of church hymns, several satires, and a translation of the Psalms.
Shall I, wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair? ”

“ Although Wither lived until 2d May 1667, and was constantly active with his pen, his Hallelujah, 1641, another book of sacred verse, is the only production of his that has received or that deserves much praise. The last thirty years of his long life were eventful and unfortunate. After being a somewhat fervent Royalist, he suddenly changed his creed at the outbreak of the great rebellion, sold his estate to raise men for the Parliament, and was active in its cause with pen as well as with sword. ”

“ Withers, was instituted in the privacy of a garden; sub rosa, as it were. Civilization flaunts it in the glare of day. The dull marry the poor; the rich the effete; and so our New Jerusalem is peopled with naturals, plain and coloured, at either end. I detest folly; I detest still more (if I must be frank, dear Arthur) mere cleverness. Mankind has simply become a tailless host of uninstinctive animals. We should never have taken to Evolution, Mr. Withers. ”

“ Meditations advancing the Glory of God, in the practise of pietie and virtue’ (London, 1641, 12mo) . ‘Halelujah’ is one of the scarcest of all Wither's publications; only four copies are known, of which one is in the British Museum, and a second belongs to Mr. Huth. At the same date Wither repeated his old warning of the nation's impending peril in ‘A Prophesie written long since for this year 1641,’ London, n.d., 8vo (a reprint of the eighth canto of ‘Britain's Remembrancer’ of 1628) .
In 1642 he sold such estate as he possessed and raised a troop of horse for the parliament. ”

“ Whereunto is annexed a Paraphrase on the Creed, and the Lords Prayer’ (London, printed by John Beale for Thomas Walkley, 1620, 8vo) . Wither retorted by issuing an authentic collection of his finest works, called ‘Jvvenilia. A collection of those Poemes which were heretofore imprinted, and written by George Wither’ (London, printed for John Budge, 1622, 8vo, with an engraved title) . There was a reissue of 1626 (‘for Robert Allot’) . A new edition of 1633 included ‘Faire Virtue.’ It is mainly on the contents of this volume that Wither's position as a poet depends. ”

“ She simply hemmed me defencelessly in with a cloud of men that held me impotent, and yet one and all refused to administer to my poor flustered old king a merciful coup de grâce.
"There," she said, as the clock struck ten—"a drawn game, Withers. We are very evenly matched. A very creditable defence, Withers. You know your room. There's supper on a tray in the dining-room. Don't let the creature over-eat himself. The gong will sound three-quarters of an hour before a punctual breakfast." She held out her cheek to Seaton, and he kissed it with obvious perfunctoriness. ”

“ And Withred succeeded to the kingdom of the Kentish-men, and held it thirty-three years. Withred was the son of Egbert, Egbert of Earconbert, Earconbert of Eadbald, Eadbald of Ethelbert.
As soon as he was king, he commanded a great council to be assembled at the place which is called Baccancelde [41] in which sat Withred, king of the Kentish-men, and Berthwald, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Tobias, bishop of Rochester, and with them were assembled abbats and abbesses, and many wise men, all to consult about the bettering of God's churches in Kent. ”

“ Withers was a charming person to contemplate from a safe distance,—Simon, who never lent himself to idle detraction. She remembered, too, that she had often reproached herself for her irrational prejudice against the man,—that she was forever finding something false and sinister in the face that every one else said was eminently handsome, and ugly dissonance in the voice that all Hendrik praised for its music. Was he on both sides of that card?—Ah, well! it might be just nothing, after all; the poor lady might be ill, or vexed past endurance at home ”

“ For J. Hayden Witherbee, one quick glance was enough. Four—no, five—five alert-looking young men, all plainly marked with the signs of a craft abhorrent to Mr. Witherbee, sat in a row of chairs beyond a railing; and beyond them was a sixth person, a young woman with a tiptilted nose and a pair of inquisitive, expectant gray eyes. Mr. Witherbee would have known them anywhere by their backs—jackals of the press, muckrakers, sworn enemies to Mr. Witherbee and all his kith and kind!
It was Mr. Witherbee who slammed the door shut, drawing Judge Priest back into the shelter of the closed room ”

“ In the forest cell, Meinrad disciplined his body by rigorous fasts, and his soul by constant prayer. By degrees, his cabin became a resort of pilgrims, who arrived seeking ease to their troubled consciences, or illumination to their dark understandings. Always united to God, always penetrated with the sense of His presence, he strove to know the will of God, and to submit his own will wholly to that. ”

“ An' you forgive me, Hinry darlin', you forgive me?”
“I've nothing to forgive,” said Henry Withers.
A smile lighted the blanched face of the dying man. “Give me love to the boy—to Peter Macnamara!” he said, and fell back with a smile on his face.
“I'd do it again. Wot's a lie so long as it does good?” said Henry Withers afterwards to Holgate the engineer. “But tell ’er, tell Kitty! no fear! I ain't no bloomin' fool. 'E's 'appy—that's enough. ”