moment—any one who cares to turn over
tenderly, the leaves of that garden of sweets,
his song-book, called the Hesperides.
Appropriately so called, indeed, collectively—
for, among them, are there not golden apples
of beauty enough and to spare ? Yet,
guarding every access to this green
pleasance, lying in ambush at every turn, lurk
the foul dragons of licentiousness!
Insomuch that here, we should almost feel
disposed to welcome for once, with a sense
of satisfaction, that general object of our
abhorrence a revised or excerpted edition
—what Southey aptly designated, when
speaking of some of these very ditties, a few
"beautiful pearls raked from the dunghill"—
a project Dr. Nott once actually attempted;
though very inadequately. It would  be
tantamount to a dash of soda-water to a wine-
bibber far gone in his potations. It would
be literally setting delightful old Master
Herrick on his feet again in the world's
estimation, enabling him to loiter down his
page without reeling, and to sing without a
hiccup. What a delicious way he has—this
charming old world song writer—whenever
he moves with a seemly gait and talks to us
coherently!

Although apparently but the offspring of a
well-to-do goldsmith and banker of Cheapside,
Robert Herrick was in reality directly
descended from an ancient and honourable
family in Leicestershire. His genealogy has
been minutely traced back to the middle
of the fifteenth century, by the learned and
laborious annalist of that county, Mr. John
Nichol. Nevertheless, it was at the paternal
home over the goldsmith's shop in Cheapside,
that Robert Herrick was born on the
twentieth of August, fifteen hundred and
ninety-one, being baptised four days later in
the parish church of St. Nicholas Vedast,
Foster Lane. A little more than a twelve-
month afterwards, namely on Lord Mayor's
Day in the year following, Nicholas Herrick,
his father, expired prematurely: not only
prematurely, but under rather suspicious
circumstances. For dying, as it is stated, in
consequence of injuries received from
tumbling from an upper window of his house
upon the great public thoroughfare, it has
been conjectured—from the significant
circumstance of his having made his will but
just forty-eight hours previously—that the
event was not, in reality, entirely accidental.
However caused, his demise, at any rate
occurred thus unexpectedly: leaving
abruptly widowed with some half-a-dozen
orphan children (one of them even then
unborn) the young wife to whom he had been
married only eleven years before—Julia,
daughter of William Stone, of Seghenoe, in
Bedfordshire. The goldsmith's property,
estimated by himself at nearly three thousand
pounds, realised as many as five thousand
sterling. This was the sole provision left to his
family: yet it proved sufficient to establish his
eldest son, Thomas, as a farmer, and his second,
Nicholas, as a Levant merchant; Robert,
the third or fourth son, being left, almost
exclusively, to the guardianship of his uncle,
Sir William Heyrick, of Beaumanor. It has
been supposed—from certain allusions to its
"beloved" sports and pastimes scattered
here and there through the Hesperides—that
the poet's education in childhood was
conducted in the old classic seminary at
Westminster. It is, however, undoubted that in
sixteen hundred and fifteen he was entered a
Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge. It
is equally certain that, some three years later,
he was removed to Trinity, where he took his
degree in arts. As ultimately in his choice
of a profession, so previously in his change of
colleges, Robert Herrick appears to have
been capricious. Aspiring first of all to
distinction in the law, he finally entered holy
orders: although it has never been
discovered when, or by whose hands, this right
clerkly bacchanalian was ordained.
Ultimately, through the patronage of the Earl
of Exeter—though not, it should be observed ,
until he was thirty-eight years of age—
Robert Herrick was presented by King
Charles the First to the vicarage of Dean
Prior, in Devonshire. His predecessor, Dr.
Burnaby Potter, had, but just then, been
promoted to the see of Carlisle. The nest
into which our poor middle-aged bird of song
fluttered for repose and shelter must have
seemed to him provokingly warm from the
translation from it of that phœnix of the
episcopacy. From this period the germs of
Herrick's ambition appear only to have
blossomed in disappointment. He was as entirely
out of his element as Sidney Smith proved
to be a couple of hundred years afterwards,
when banished to the lonely curacy on
Salisbury plain.

Herrick chafed under his exile for nineteen
years, uninterruptedly. So bitterly and so
regretfully, that we find him actually exulting
over his ejection from his living, in sixteen
hundred and forty-eight, when the Puritans
were purging the church of even a suspicion
of royalism; when Zeal-of-the-land-busy, and
Praise-God-bare-bones with their congenial
associates were, as one might say, distributing
the fat pluralities of the Crown among the
lean singularities of the Commonwealth.

Trundled out of his snug home—the
comforts of which during the actual time of
their enjoyment he appears scarcely to
have appreciated—our jovial ex-vicar, bound
London-ward, muttered to himself, we are
told, almost exultingly, even in the midst of
the loving regrets of his parishioners, as he
crossed the little river on the outskirts of the
village:

    "Dean-bourn, farewell; I never look to see
     Dean, or thy warty incivility."

Twelve years afterwards, however, he again
visited the old home and the old haunts,