he has been realized to us! Could we but raise up for a summer afternoon the Devonshire which he lived in, and the people with whom he mixed or summon the ghost of faithful Prudence Baldwin, we might be furnished with inspiration to do something better than the bare sketch which follows. HAZLITT, WILLIAM CAREW, 1869, ed. Hesperides, Preface, vol. I, p. viii. Rare old Herrick, the Cavalier Vicar

Of pleasant Dean Prior by Totnes TownRather too wont in foaming liquor

The cares of those troublous times to drown

Of wicked wit by no means chary-
Of ruddy lips not at all afraid;
If you gave him milk in a Devonshire dairy,
He'd probably kiss the dairymaid.
-COLLINS, MORTIMER, 1876? Herrick.

Being ejected by Cromwell from his church living in 1648, he dropped his title of "Reverend" to assume that of "Esquire," and published a volume to which he gave the title of "Hesperides; or, the Works both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq." Doubtless the "Esquire" was accepted by the public, as well as by himself, as more appropriate than "Reverend" would have been to the character of the lyrics, some part of which he yet seems rather arrogantly to call "Divine."-MORRILL, JUSTIN S., 1887, Self-Consciousness of Noted Persons, p. 90.

This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus. It was such a figure as the artist would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures. -MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands Letters and Kings, Elizabeth to Anne, p. 124.

Mr. Gosse, for example, assures us that Julia really walked the earth, and even gives us some details of her mundane pilgrimage; other critics smile, and shake their heads, and doubt. It matters not; she lives, and she will continue to live when we who dispute the matter lie voiceless in our graves. The essence of her personality lingers on every page where Herrick sings of her. His verse is heavy with her spicy perfumes, glittering with

her many-colored jewels, lustrous with the shimmer of her silken petticoats. Her very shadow, her sighs, distills sweet odors on the air, and draws him after her, faint with their amorous languor. How lavish she is with her charms, this woman who neither thinks nor suffers; who prays, indeed, sometimes, with great serenity, and dips her snowy finger in the font of blessed water, but whose spiritual humors pale before the calm vigor of her earthly nature! How kindly, how tranquil, how unmoved, she is; listening with the same slow smile to her lover's fantastic wordplay, to the fervid conceits with which he beguiles the summer idleness, and to the frank and sudden passion with which he conjures her, "dearest of thousands," to close his eyes when death shall summon him, to shed some true tears above the sod, to clasp forever the book in which he writes her name! How gently she would have fulfilled these last sad duties had the discriminating fates called her to his bier; how fragrant the sighs she would have wafted in that darkened chamber; how sincere the temperate sorrow for a remediable loss! And then, out into the glowing sunlight, where life is sweet, and the world exults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, and, underneath the scattered primrose blossoms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their graves.-REPPLIER, AGNES, 1891, English Love-Songs, Points of View, p. 33.

The

The same sensuous feeling which made him invest his friends with the perfume of Juno or Isis, sing of their complexions. as roses overspread with lawn, compare their lips to cherries, and praise their silver feet, had also its other side. unlucky wights who incurred the poet's wrath were treated in a fashion equally offensive to good taste and good manners. Nor are these gruesome epigrams the only apples in the garden of Herrick's "Hesperides" which have affronted the taste of modern readers. The epigrams indeed, if apples at all, are rather the dusty apples of the Dead Sea than the pleasant fruit of the Western Isles; but Herrick's "Epithalamia," odes whose sustained splendour gives them a high rank among his poems, because they sing of other marriage-rites than those of rice and slipper, have also tended to restrict the circle of his readers in an age which prides itself

on its modesty.

Hence it has come about

that while the names of the lovely ladies of the poet's imagination,-Julia, Dianeme, Electra, Perilla-are widely known, those of the men and women whom Herrick treasured as his friends are all but forgotten. POLLARD, ALFRED W., 1892, Herrick and his Friends, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 67, p. 142.

It seems likely that Perilla and her fair companions were actually known to Herrick in London, and were then made the topic of many a gallant verse; and that after he sailed away to the West he continued to write to their memory as though they were actually present; that, in fact, the goddesses he was never weary of worshipping were, to a large extent, abstractions and ideals. And when in the quiet of his little parsonage, or in a sunny Devonshire meadow bright with wild flowers, his fancy coined some musical verse in honour of his ideal love, his memory would glide quickly back and dwell longingly on her prototype of flesh and blood whom he had known and loved in former years; and, cut off from all the noises and all the rivalries of the town, it must have seemed to him that he was thinking of another Robert Herrick who had lived long ago. SANDERS, H. M., 1896, Robert Herrick, The Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 280, p. 604.

Whether or not the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artist lends an air of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his sermon at the heads of his drowsy parishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has the aspect of one meditating assault and battery. To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiability of the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings. . . . I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections.ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, 1900, Poems of Robert Herrick, Introduction, pp. xxvii, xxviii,

XXX.

HESPERIDES 1648

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,

Of April, May, of June and July-flowers; I sing of may-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridalcakes;

I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris;
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The Court of Mab and of the Fairie King;
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall,
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
HERRICK, ROBERT, 1648, The Argument
of His Book, Hesperides, p. 3.

Ships lately from the islands came,
With wines, thou never heard'st by name.
Montefiasco, Frontiniac,

Vernaccio, and that old sack
Young Herric took to entertaine
The muses in a sprightly vein.
-ANON, 1656, To Parson Weeks, an In-
vitation to London, Musarum Delicia.
An then Flaccus Horace,
He was but a sowr-ass,
And good for nothing but Lyricks,
There's but One to be found

In all English ground
Writes as well;-who is hight Robert Herick.
-ANON, 1658, Naps upon Parnassus.

Herrick published his poems at an age when youth and inexperience could not be urged in extenuation of the blemishes which they presented. The author was fifty-seven years old when the "Hesperides" issued from the press, replete with beauties and excellencies, and at the same time abounding in passages of outrageous grossness. The title was perhaps rather apt to mislead, for besides golden apples, this garden assuredly contained many rank tares and poisonous roots. It would scarcely suffice to plead the freedom and breadth of speech customary among all classes and with both sexes at that period. Some share of the blame must, beyond question, be laid to Herrick's voluptuousness of temperament, and not very cleanly ardour of imagination; yet, after all deductions which it is possible to make, what a noble salvage remains! Enough beauty, wit, nay piety, to convert even the prudish to an admiration of the genius

which shines transparent through all.HAZLITT, WILLIAM CAREW, 1869, ed. Hesperides, Preface, vol. I, p. viii.

The "Hesperides" is so rich in jewelry, that the most careless selection can hardly be unsatisfactory. Yet being so rich, there might have been more independent taste. One is led to ask how much of popular favouritism even in literature is, like fashion in clothes, due to dictation of the purveyors. LINTON, W. J., 1882, ed., Rare Poems of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, p. 242, note.

Herrick alone, with imperturbable serenity, continued to pipe out his pastoral ditties, and crown his head with daffodils, when England was torn to pieces with the most momentous struggle for liberty in her annals. To the poetic student he is, therefore, of especial interest, as a genuine specimen of an artist, pure and simple. Herrick brought out the "Hesperides" a few months before the King was beheaded, and people were invited to listen to little madrigals upon Julia's stomacher at the singularly inopportune moment when the eyes of the whole nation were bent on the unprecedented phenomenon of the proclamation of an English republic. To find a parallel to such unconsciousness we must come down to our own time, and recollect that Théophile Gautier took occasion of the seige of Paris to revise and republish his Emaux et Camées.-GoSSE, EDMUND, 1883, Seventeenth-Century Studies, p. 114.

In the quiet of his parsonage, the music of his life found utterance in every mood. His whole mind expressed itself, animal and spiritual. In the texture of his book he evidently meant to show the warp and woof of life. He aimed at effects of contrast that belonged to the true nature of man, in whom, as in the world at large, "the strawberry grows underneath the nettle," and side by side with promptings. of the flesh, spring up the aspirations of the spirit. Even the dainty fairy pieces written under influence of the same fashion that caused Shakespeare to describe Queen Mab and Drayton to write his Nymphidia, even such pieces of his, written in earlier days, Herrick sprinkled about his volume in fragments. He would not make his nosegay with the flowers of each sort bunched together in so many lumps. There is truth in the

He

close contact of a playful sense of ugliness with the most delicate perception of all forms of beauty. Herrick's "epigrams" on running eyes and rotten teeth, and the like, are such exaggerations as may often have tumbled out spontaneously, in the course of playful talk, and if they pleased him well enough were duly entered in his book. In a healthy mind, this whimsical sense of deformity may be but the other side of a fine sense of beauty. -MORLEY, HENRY, 1884, ed. Hesperides (Morley's Universal Library), p. 7.

That the "Hesperides" is the most typical single book of the class and kind there can be little doubt, though there may be higher and rarer touches in others. Its bulk, its general excellence in its own kind, make it exhibit the combined influences of Donne and Jonson (which, as was pointed out earlier, tell upon, and to some extent account for, this lyrical outburst) better than any other single volume. And long as Herrick had to wait for his public (it must be confessed that, though the times do not seem to have in the least chained the poet's tongue, they did much to block his hearers' ears), there is now not much difference of opinion in general points, however much there may be in particulars, about the poetical value of "The Mad Maid's Song" and "To Daffodils," of the "Night Piece to Julia" and "To the Virgins," of the "Litany" and "The White Island.” Yet this book is only the most popular and coherent collection among an immense mass of verse, all informed by the most singular and attractive quality.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1895, Social England, ed. Traill, vol. IV, p. 300.

Yellow and frayed and torn; but mark within,
The sparkling rhyme

That, like a dimple in an old dame's chin,
Laughs out at Time!

-WELCH, ROBERT GILBERT, 1896, In an
Ancient Copy of Herrick's "Hesperides,"
The Century Magazine, vol. 51, p. 477.

secular. ASHE, T., 1883, Robert Herrick, Temple Bar, vol. 68, p. 132.

Of the religious poems the alreadymentioned "Litany," while much the most familiar, is also far the best. There is nothing in English verse to equal it as an expression of religious fear; while there is also nothing in English verse to equal the "Thanksgiving," also well known, as an expression of religious trust.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 356.

The religious pieces grouped under the title of "Noble Numbers" distinctly associate themselves with Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very few of them are "born of the royal blood." They lack the inspiration and magic of his secular poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the absolute soundness of Herrick's mind at all times. The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he may read Herrick's poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. -ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, 1900, Poems of Robert Herrick, Introduction, p. xxv.

GENERAL

One of the Scholars of Apollo of the middle Form, yet something above George Withers, in a pretty Flowry and Pastoral Gale of Fancy, in a vernal Prospect of some Hill, Cave, Rock, or Fountain;

which but for the interruption of other trivial Passages, might have made up none of the worst Poetick Landskips. WINSTANLEY, WILLIAM, 1668, The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets.

These two books of poetry made him much admired in the time when they were published, especially by the generous and boon loyalists, among whom he was numbred as a sufferer.-WOOD, ANTHONY, 1691-1721, Athena Oxonienses, vol. II, f. 122.

It appears from the effects of her inspiration, that Prue was but indifferently qualified for a tenth muse. GRANGER, JAMES, 1769-1824, Biographical History of England, vol. III, p. 136.

Had Herrick adopted any arrangement or classification for his poetry, it would probably have experienced a kinder fate. The reader would then have had the opportunity of choosing the department

most congenial to his taste, and without incurring the risk of being seduced into the perusal of matter offensive to his feelings. At present, so injudiciously are the contents of his volume disposed, and so totally divested of order and propriety, that it would almost seem the poet wished to pollute and bury his best effusions in a mass of nonsense and obscenity. Nine persons out of ten who should casually dip into the collection, would, in all probability, after glancing over a few trifling epigrams, throw it down with indignation, little apprehending it contained many pieces of a truly moral and pathetic, and of an exquisitely rural and descriptive, strain.-DRAKE, NATHAN, 1798, Literary Hours, vol. III, No. xliv.

So.

Herrick is a writer who does not answer the expectations I had formed of him. He is in a manner a modern discovery, and so far has the freshness of antiquity about him. He is not trite and thread bare. But neither is he likely to become He is a writer of epigrams, not of lyrics. He has point and ingenuity, but I think little of the spirit of love or wine. From his frequent allusion to pearls and rubies, one might take him for a lapidary instead of a poet.-HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1820, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth.

A coarse-minded and beastly writer, whose dunghill, when the few flowers that grew therein had been transplanted, ought never to have been disturbed. Those flowers indeed are beautiful and perennial; but they should have been removed from the filth and ordure in which they are embedded.-SOUTHEY, ROBERT, 1831, Lives of Uneducated Poets, p. 85.

Without the exuberant gayety of Suckling, or perhaps the delicacy of Carew, he is sportive, fanciful, and generally of polished language. The faults of his age are sometimes apparent: though he is not often obscure, he runs, more perhaps for the sake of variety than any other cause, into occasional pedantry. He has his conceits and false thoughts; but these are more than redeemed by the numerous very little poems (for those of Herrick are frequently not longer than epigrams), which may be praised without much more qualification than belongs to such poetry. -HALLAM, HENRY, 1837 39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. v.

The Ariel of poets, sucking "where the bee sucks" from the roseheart of nature, and reproducing the fragrance idealized.-BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT, 1842-63, The Book of the Poets.

As a loyalist and sufferer in the cause, there can be no doubt that Herrick was popular with the Cavalier party, and that his poems were received with the favour they deserved by his contemporaries, for that they were popular must be inferred

from the number of them which were set to music by Henry Lawes, Laniere, Wilson, and Ramsay; it is somewhat difficult to account for the seeming neglect which they experienced in after times.-SINGER, S. W., 1846, ed. Hesperides, Biographical Notice, vol. I, p. xxv.

More than any eminent writer of that day, Herrick's collection requires careful sifting; but there is so much fancy, so much delicacy, so much grace, that a good selection would well repay the publisher. Bits there are that are exquisite.

But his real delight was among flowers and bees, and nymphs and cupids; and certainly these graceful subjects were never handled more gracefully.-MITFORD, MARY RUSSELL, 1851, Recollections of a Literary Life, pp. 143, 144.

He was an Anacreon or Catullus in holy orders, whiling away, at the ripe age of forty, the dulness of his Devonshire parsonage in such ditties as these:

"Much I know, of time is spent," &c., &c.

And so, in every other poem, he sings or sips his wine, with his arm round a Julia! What eyes, what lips, what a neck! and so on amorously, beyond all clerical limits. Like Anacreon, he is sweet, too, in light sensuous descriptions of physical nature. There

was, moreover, a tinge of amiable melancholy in his genius-the melancholy on which the Epicurean philosophy itself rests.-MASSON, DAVID, 1858, The Life of John Milton, vol. 1, ch. vi.

It is an especial pleasure to write the name of Robert Herrick amongst the poets of religion, for the very act records that the jolly, careless Anacreon of the church, with his head and heart crowded with pleasures, threw down at length his winecup, tore the roses from his head, and knelt in the dust.--MACDONALD, GEORGE, 1868, England's Antiphon, p. 163.

Making due allowance of the time when Herrick's verses were written, his temptation to suit the taste of courtiers and kings, his volumes contain much admirable poetry, tempered with religious. devotion. He wrote sweet and virtuous verse, with lines here and there that should not have been written. But he is an antedote to the vice in his lines, and may well have place in the scholar's library with Donne, Daniel, Cowley, Shakespeare, and contemporaries. ALCOTT, A. BRONSON, 1869, Concord Days, p. 136.

Many of his compositions are, in the fullest sense of the term, trifles; others are at least exquisite trifles; some are not trifles, and are exquisite. After more than a century of neglect, ensuing upon their first ample popularity, Herrick's writings have for years been kept freshlaudation-certainly not unjustified, so ened with a steady current of literary far as their finer qualities go, but tending a little to the indiscriminate.-RosSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1872-78, ed. Humorous Poems, p. 98.

Beyond all dispute, the best of the early lyric poets is Robert Herrick, whose verses are flushed with a joyous and tender spirit. He may be styled the Burns of his time, and was imbued with something of the reckless soul of the great northcountryman. . Flowers, music,

woman, all these had their intense and several charms for him, and, strangely enough for a middle-aged clergyman, he was clearly an amorous and erotic poet. -SMITH, GEORGE BARNETT, 1875, English Fugitive Poets, Poets and Novelists, pp. 381, 382.

Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls who drink of him, Herrick offers "securos latices." He is conspicuously free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no overstrain, no spasmodic cry, no wire-drawn analysis or sensational rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary inspiration, no mannered archaism:-above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he

his