shows the note, the only genuine note, -of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to "please now, and please for long."-PALGRAVE, FRANCIS TURNER, 1877, Robert Herrick, Macmillan's Magazine, vol. 35.

Among the English pastoral poets, Herrick takes an undisputed precedence, and as a lyrist generally he is scarcely excelled, except by Shelley. No other writer of the seventeenth century approached him in abundance of song, in sustained exercise of the purely musical and intuitive gifts of poetry. Shakspeare, Milton, and perhaps Fletcher, surpassed him in the passion and elevated harmony of their best lyrical pieces, as they easily excelled him in the wider range of their genius and the breadth of their accomplishment. But while these men exercised their art in all its branches, Herrick confined himself very narrowly to one or two, and the unflagging freshness of his inspiration, flowing through a long life in so straitened a channel, enabled him to amass such a wealth of purely lyrical poetry as no other Englishman has produced. His level of performance was very high; he seems to have preserved all that he wrote, and the result is that we possess more than twelve hundred of his little poems, in at least one out of every three of which we may find something charming or characteristic. Of all the Cavalier lyrists Herrick is the only one that followed the bent of his genius undisturbed, and lived a genuine artist's life.--GOSSE, EDMUND, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. II, p. 124.

By a strange irony of fortune the only letters we possess from the genial and glowing pen of the great poet of the "Hesperides" are a series of plaintive notes to his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick; and we may gather from them that this amiable relative's money paid for the piping of some of the most graceful lyrics in the English language.-SCOONES, W. BAPTISTE, 1880, Four Centures of English Letters, p. 67.

He sings well chiefly when he sings of love, but this love is not of the kind which inspires our greatest poets. He is enamoured with the accessories of a woman's beauty-the colour of a ribbon, the flaunting of a ringlet, with "a careless

shoe-string," or the wave of a petticoat. The charms he sees in his mistress are likened to precious stones, and all the treasures of the lapidary are represented in his verse. There are few traces of tenderness in Herrick and none of passion; it is probable that every pretty girl he saw suggested a pretty fancy. Το judge from his own saying, "no man at one time can be wise and love." Herrick was not wise. If we may trust his verses, the poet was perennially in love, chiefly with Julia, "prime of all," but warmly too with Anthea, Lucia, Corinna, and Perilla. Making love is in Herrick's eyes a charming amusement, and the more. love-making the more poetry. If Julia prove unkind, he can solace himself with Sappho; and if Sappho be perverse, some other mistress will charm him with her "pretty witchcrafts."- DENNIS, JOHN, 1883, Heroes of Literature, p. 97.

None of our English lyric poets has shown a more perfect sense of words and of their musical efficiency, none has united. so exquisitely a classic sense of form to that impulsive tunefulness which we have come to consider as essentially English. In his earlier lyrics Herrick has perhaps more of this impulse, but it served him with the same youthful freshness to the last. It is the way in which Herrick adds to and completes this natural lyrical impulse by the further grace of verse taught by the Latin verse-writers and their English disciples, that makes him so consummate an artist within his range. There is magic in these lyrics, that indefinable quality, born of the spirit, which can alone avail in the end to make poetry live.-RHYS, ERNEST, 1887, Hesperides: Poems by Robert Herrick, Introduction, pp. xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii.

Many suns have set and shone,
Many springs have come and gone,
Herrick, since thou sang'st of Wake,
Morris-dance, and Barley-break;
Many men have ceased from care,
Many maidens have been fair,
Since thou sang'st of Julia's eyes,
Julia's lawns and tiffanies;
Many things are past-but thou,
Golden-Mouth, art singing now,
Singing clearly as of old,

And thy numbers are of gold.
-DOBSON, AUSTIN, 1887, In a Copy of the
Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick, Scribner's
Magazine, vol. 1, p. 66.

Divided, in the published form, into two classes they may be divided, for purposes of poetical criticism, into three. The "Hesperides" (they are dated 1648, and the "Noble Numbers" or sacred poems 1647; but both appeared together) consist in the first place of occasional poems, sometimes amatory, sometimes not; in the second, of personal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any faculty of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary exercises-bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest attempts of Davies of Hereford; they are farther from the author's best than the worst parts of Young's "Odes" are from the best part of the "Night Thoughts." It is impossible without producing specimens (which God forbid that any one who has a respect for Herrick, for literature, and for decency, should do) to show how bad they are. Let it only be said that if the worst epigram of Martial were stripped of Martial's wit, sense, and literary form, it would be a kind of example of Herrick in this vein. In his two other veins, but for certain tricks of speech, it is almost impossible to recognise him for the same man. secular vigour of the "Hesperides," the spiritual vigour of the "Noble Numbers,' has rarely been equalled and never surpassed by any other writer.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, p. 355.

The

Herrick the inexhaustible in dainties; Herrick, that parson-pagan, with the soul of a Greek of the Anthology, and a cure of souls (Heaven help them!) in Devonshire. His Julia is the least mortal of these "daughters of dreams and of stories," whom poets celebrate; she has a certain opulence of flesh and blood, a cheek like a damask rose, and "rich eyes,' like Keat's lady; no vaporous Beatrice, she; but a handsome English wench, with "A cuff neglectful and thereby Ribbons to flow confusedly; A winning wave, deserving note In the tempestuous petticoat." --LANG, ANDREW, 1889, Letters on Literature, p. 149.

There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The "more's the pity" for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable, things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. MITCHELL, DONALD G., 1890, English Lands Letters and Kings, From Elizabeth to Anne, p. 125.

In Herrick the air is fragrant with newmown hay; there is a morning light upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on the eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes; and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. --HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST, 1890, Views and Reviews, p. 112.

Herrick was practically forgotten until Nichols in 1796-7 drew attention to his poetry in the "Gentleman's Magazine.' Nichols was followed by Dr. Nathan Drake, who devoted some papers to Herrick in "Literary Hours;" and in 1810 Dr. Nott published "Select Poems from the 'Hesperides," which was reviewed by Barron Field in the "Quarterly Review,' August 1810. In 1823 a complete edition, in two volumes, worthily edited by Thomas Maitland, lord Dundrennan, was published at Edinburgh, the "remainder" copies being issued (with a fresh title-page) by William Pickering in 1825. Pickering's edition of 1846 contains a memoir by S. W. Singer; an edition by Mr. Edward Walford was published in 1859; Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt's edition, 1869, 2 vols., has additional information of interest; and there is a valuable edition by Dr. Grosart, 3 vols., 1876. Selections from Herrick have been edited by Professor F. T. Palgrave and others.-BULLEN, A. H., 1891, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXVI, p. 254.

The passing of the glory of the world

is continually filling his eyes with tears, which overflow in pearls that drop within his book. There are people-surely they must have lived in a monastery or a vacuum-who are always puzzled that the men who do these exquisite things in poetry should be sensuous, let us say sensual, in their lives; but apart from the many-sidedness of man, it is surely the sensuous man alone who is capable of these rich tearful moments. One must

have lived to have lost, and Herrick lived as generously as Solomon, and his poems are a sort of Restoration Ecclesiastes, with less of the whine and a kinder heart. Yet his "Noble Numbers," or his "Pious Pieces," though at first they strike one somewhat ludicrously as coming from him, are no mere "making it right" with the powers above-they are the result of the real religious devotion which was at the bottom of Herrick's, as of every other poet's heart.-LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, 1891-95, Retrospective Reviews, vol. I, p. 3.

Herrick is distinctively a poet from whom to receive pleasure. He is not necessarily to be studied; he is to be enjoyed. Doubtless many who love his verses will be led on by an honorable curiosity to desire to know this and that concerning the man and his work. But the poetic enjoyment is the main thing. Herrick is a very individual poet. He has something about him which lifts him out of the crowd of Jacobean and Caroline lyrists, such as Carew and Suckling, nor do we think of him as on precisely the same level as his predecessors the Elizabethans. His poems have a certain air of distinction. Many of them are trivial enough, doubtless, but they are never quite commonplace.-HALE, JR., EDWARD EVERETT, 1895, Selections from the Poetry of Robert Herrick, p. lxiii.

Herrick is indeed the last expression of the pagan Renaissance, prolonged into the quiddities of the metaphysics, the self-reproaches of the mystics and the devotees, and the darkness of Puritanism. Herrick rises to no spiritual heights nor does he sink into spiritual glooms. He is frankly for this world while it lasts, piously content with its good gifts. naïveté is partly art, partly nature, or rather it is nature refined by art; for he is out and out an artist-the most perfect

His

specimen of the minor poet that England has ever known. He is purely a lyrist, and in his own vein he is really unsurpassed, whether in the English lyric or any other. CARPENTER, FREDERIC IVES, 1897, English Lyric Poetry, 1500-1700, Introduction, p. liii.

Our own age has awarded the foremost place among Caroline lyrical poets to Robert Herrick, whose verses, after having been unaccountably neglected throughout the eighteenth century, are now represented in all selections of English poetry. . . "Corinna going a-Maying," perhaps the best known of all Herrick's country poems, is one of the most perfect studies of idealized village life in the language. -MASTERMAN, J. HOWARD B., 1897, The Age of Milton, pp. 101, 102, 105.

Indeed within his own sphere, as laureate of pastoral England, and master of the lighter lyric, he has nothing to fear from comparison with the poets of any period of the literature.--PANCOAST, HENRY S., 1899, Standard English Poems, Spenser to Tennyson, p. 607.

A little over three hundred years ago England had given to her a poet of the very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not discover the fact for more than a hundred and fifty years afterward. The poet himself was aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps not too modestly, in countless quatrains and couplets, which were not read, or, if read, were not much regarded at the moment. It has always been an incredulous world in this matter. So many poets have announced their arrival, and not arrived.

Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brevity of his poems for he wrote nothing de longue haleine--would place him among the minor singers; his workmanship places him among the masters. The Herricks were not a family of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as exquisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-hilt by Cellini; the line has nearly always that vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and is never the result of anything but austere labor.-ALDRICH, THOMAS BAILEY, 1900, Poems of Robert Herrick, Introduction, pp. xv, xl.