A liar, a drunkard, a coxcomb, is _stript and whipt;_ no Shaftesbury, no Villiers, or Wharton, is curiously anatomized, and read upon.

But to a well-natured mind there is a charm of moral sensibility running through them, which amply compensates the want of those luxuries.

Wither seems everywhere bursting with a love of goodness, and a hatred of all low and base actions.

At this day it is hard to discover what parts of the poem here particularly alluded to, _Abuses Stript and Whipt_, could have occasioned the imprisonment of the author.

Was Vice in High Places more suspicious than now?
had she more power; or more leisure to listen after ill reports?
That a man should be convicted of a libel when he named no names but Hate, and Envy, and Lust, and Avarice, is like one of the indictments in the Pilgrim's Progress, where Faithful is arraigned for having "railed on our noble Prince Beelzebub, and spoken contemptibly of his honorable friends, the Lord Old Man, the Lord Carnal Delight, and the Lord Luxurious." What unlucky jealousy could have tempted the great men of those days to appropriate such innocent abstractions to themselves?
Wither seems to have contemplated to a degree of idolatry his own possible virtue.