Most of all, however, do we delight to
picture Herrick to ourselves, as he must
have looked habitually when he lived, and
loved, and laughed, for nearly forty years
down at the old Dean Prior Vicarage. A
reverend parson of the days of the merry
Monarch, no longer disguised in the
puritanical doublet and hose of coarse cloth,
turned up with velvet of a dull drab or
mouse-colour—but flaunting it on gala-days
among his parishioners, with a sly shoulder-
knot, or a new-fangled shoe-buckle! Yonder
he sits in his porch, under the honey-suckle,
not the least bit in the world like a clergyman.
Precisely as Marshall's uncompromising
graver has depicted him in the original
edition of the Hesperides—with a wonderful
Roman-nosed Brutus-shaped profile; a
moustache like an eyebrow, and no forehead at
all to speak of! His eyes still lustrous
(though their sight, he says, begins to fail
him) under the shadow of his close curling
hair; hair grizzled like that of the royal
ghost in Hamlet, "a sable silvered!" His
whole form and features "fat and smooth,"
according to his own accurate description of
them, and his voice fat too, and weak—in
spite of his broad bull-throat. At his feet,
curled up into a ball asleep, his little spaniel
Tracie. In the trim privet hedgerow bordering
the lawn hard by—preening itself, with
an occasional flutter—the tiny tame sparrow,
Phil; whose death the vicar will have
to sing of tenderly hereafter. From the
house-room within, however, glides out into
the sunshine with his afternoon potation, the
one faithful and favourite domestic, pretty
Mistress Prudence Baldwin, his housekeeper,
simply Prue in the Hesperides. As he takes
the cup from her, you perceive at a glance,
that it is not without reason the author of
that Book of the Golden Apple Garden has
there bewailed, in verse, the "losse" of one
of his fingers; those remaining to him,
however, on that plump hand of his, yet enabling
him to hold a tankard as firmly and as
lovingly as the grasp of a Bardolph, or a
Silenus. But, see where comes grunting to
him to drink the dregs out of that tankard
the pet pig to whom the merry parson has
taught that same fantastic accomplishment.
It is a quaint scene enough altogether, and
one that betrays at once in its every odd
particular the queer old bachelor, who, but for
the simplicity of his habits, and the tendency
of his creed, would most assuredly have
degenerated into the mere sensual voluptuary.
As it is, quoth he himself, right honestly,

          "I could never walk alone,
           Put a shirt of sackcloth on," &c.

Trust him for that! Rather than sackcloth
a robe of eider-down, with the pile inwards!
Candidly, too, he sings of himself like a new
Epicurus:

          "I fear no earthly powers;
           But care for crowns of flowers;
           And love to have my beard
           With wine and oil besmeared."

Protesting frankly, in his Hymn to Venus,
despite those draggled and canary-stained
bands of cambric on his bosom:

          "Goddess, I do love a girl
           Ruby-lipped, and toothed with pearl!"

And she? Why, mark! where she passes
upon the instant, tripping daintily along
the brown and grassy pathway of the village
road. You catch delightful glimpses of her
through the lattice-work paling of the
vicar's garden, and in among the green light
of the fragrant and dancing branches. It is
Julia—his muse, his inspiration. What,
he asks himself, shall he sing of her briefly?
And thus answers:

          "Black and rolling is her eye,
           Double-chinned, and forehead high,
           Lips she has all ruby red,
           Cheeks like cream enclaretted."

Her blush he likens to a rose when
"blowing." Her kiss, he says, is a miraculous
anodyne. The very warmth of her
complexion he compares to oil of lilies and to
spikenard. Her voice—has he not sung
of it?

          "So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
           As, could they hear, the damned would make no noise,
           But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
           Melting melodious words to lutes of amber."

Her mere shadow, saith he, breathes of
pomander. If he bids her make a bridecake
he tells her she has but to knead the dough,
and 'twill be turned to almond-paste; to kiss
it, and 'twill be spiced. He sees the babies
in her eyes as vividly as Camoëns saw them
in the eyes of his Katarina, as so many
another poet has done (before and since) in
those of his ladyelove. He describes, as
bewitchingly as did Sir John Suckling, in the
famous stanzas,—her little feet playing at
bo-peep under the hem of her petticoat.
That silken petticoat itself he sings; and
sings, too, the very manner of its wearer's
walking movement. Describing thus the
perfect walking of a perfect lady, where,
speaking of what he calls "that liquefaction
of her clothes," he exclaims:

          "Next when I cast my eyes, and see
           That brave vibration each way free,
           O how that glittering taketh me!"

Everything about her, indeed, furnished
him with themes for poetical eulogium, as
almost everything around himself appeared
to abound more or less with sources to him
of rapturous delight and admiration.
Silvered though his own locks were by the
winters of considerably more than half a
century, he could, nevertheless, in one of the
most fairy-like of his little, pastoral ditties,
dandle a cowslip-ball as gleefully as any