never more to leave them. Returning to the
familiar vicarage in sixteen hundred and
sixteen, when he was reinstated in it by King
Charles the Second,  immediately after the
Restoration. Puritan John Sym, or Sim, who had
held the post pretty tightly during the interval,
being thereupon, of course, very summarily
translated from Sim into Eram, from a no doubt
extremely agreeable present tense, into one
decidedly and most unpleasantly imperfect.
There, in his accustomed bed-chamber in the
homely, vicarial tenement at Dean Prior,
Robert Herrick breathed his last, eventually
in sixteen hundred and seventy-four, having
attained no less than three summers beyond
the ripe old age of an octogenarian!  A
memorandum in the old parish-register still
informing us that "Robert Herrick, Vicker,"
was buried in that year, on the fifteenth of
October.

It was during the period of his first sojourn
for nearly twenty years at the rural vicarage
near Totness, that Robert Herrick penned
those fourteen hundred little melodious
poems through the medium of which his
name is still held in remembrance—his Noble
Numbers and his Hesperides. It was during
his twelve years' residence in London under
the commonwealth that he published those
poems collectively under the title of his
Works, both Human and Divine, in humorous
comment upon which title Campbell
remarks as quaintly, as truly and sententiously,
"What is divine has much of poetry, that
which is human has the frailty of flesh."
Immediately, indeed, upon the Reverend Robert
Herrick's arrival in the capital, after the
abrupt dismissal from his vicarage, it should
be observed that he dropped both the clerical
gown and the clerical appellation, resuming
the lay habit and reverting to the title (such
as it is) of Esquire. He dropped
something more, however, than his vicar's gown,
when he went to live first of all upon his
Fifths and afterwards (when cruelly deprived
of that small proportion of the church
revenues usually conceded to the royalist
clergy upon their ejectment) upon his Wits,
somewhere down in the back slums of St.
Anne's parish, in the city of Westminster.
Alas! be it said, then also he let fall with
his clerical bands and frock his whole sense
of decency. Driven by necessity to eke out
a subsistence, as he best could, upon the
proceeds of his poetical writings—to the end
that he might tickle the palates of those he
hoped would feed upon them—he purposely
interlarded a wholesome banquet of sweets
with the hottest and the most highly spiced
of all imaginable literary condiments. Designing
to provide some intellectual meat for
appetites the most notoriously depraved, he
literally—to employ an expressive idiom
—made no bones at all about it; or, if he
did, he certainly had them very thoroughly
devilled.

By turns of the pen the most villainously
adroit conceivable, he deliberately, and
with malice aforethought, transformed what
was almost prudish into what was
absolutely prurient ,—not only giving the reins
to his own skittish fancy upon every
possible opportunity, but even applying the
most superfluous goad to the unbridled
imagination of a licentious age. It is
something strangely lamentable to think of this
wanton sullying of his raiment, both as a
priest and as a poet, trailing it wilfully, as he
did, in the mire of the squalid kennel by the
way-side! Particularly lamentable,
remembering how accurately it has been said of
him by Southey, in the Quarterly, that "whenever
he wrote to please himself, he wrote
from the heart to the heart;" recollecting
also that he has been described no less
gracefully than truthfully by another reviewer in
the Retrospective, as being "fresh as the
spring, blithe as the summer, and ripe as the
autumn"—this gay celebrant of everything
in nature most fair and beautiful! Nevertheless,
when we have scattered aside, as so
much dross, all that is foul in this poet's
wreath of the Hesperides—precisely as one
might shake out of some luxuriant orange-
bough may-bug, and larvæ, and blight, and
caterpillar—what a gloss and verdure
remain upon the leaves, what a ruddy gold
upon the fruit, what a silvery bloom and
fragrance in the flowers!

Herrick we love to think of alternately
under two very different phases of character.
Now, as a comfortable rustic parson,
domesticated in his secluded vicarage in
Devonshire. Now, again, as a spurious lay-
gentleman, a gay gallant of sixty—never (we may
be sure of that!) at his wit's end, though
very often, doubtless, sadly out at elbow—
rollicking with other Wild Wits of the town
at the merry taverns in London, or in the
boisterous, suburban bowling-greens and
quoit-grounds of Westminster. A glorious
company they must have made, those famous
friends of Herrick, gathering about him fitfully
in his strange city-life—associates, including
among them, twenty years earlier, Rare Ben
Jonson, poet, orator, and bricklayer; Cotton,
translator of Montaigne; Denham, author of
Cooper's Hill; Selden, most sociable of
antiquaries. To the prince amongst them
all, has not our writer sung in the clear,
ringing voice of love—love for the mere
remembrance of their renowned wit-combats
and drinking-bouts at the Mermaid and
elsewhere—

                    "Ah Ben!
                     Say how or when
                 Shall we, thy guests,
             Meet at those lyric feasts,
             Made at the Sun,
             The Dog, the Triple Tun;
         Where we such clusters had,
        As made us nobly wild, not mad?
  And yet each verse of thine
  Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine."