Robert Herrick was descended in a direct line from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, the Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which was John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet"s grandfather, admitted freeman in 1535, and afterward twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick or Heyricke--he spelled his name recklessly--had five sons, the second of which sought a career in London, where he became a goldsmith, and in December, 1582, married Julian Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen Soame. One of the many children of this marriage was Robert Herrick.
It is the common misfortune of the poet"s biographers, though it was the poet"s own great good fortune, that the personal interviewer was an unknown quant.i.ty at the period when Herrick played his part on the stage of life. Of that performance, in its intimate aspects, we have only the slightest record.
Robert Herrick was born in Wood street, Cheapside, London, in 1591, and baptized at St. Vedast"s, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that year. He had several brothers and sisters, with whom we shall not concern ourselves.
It would be idle to add the little we know about these persons to the little we know about Herrick himself. He is a sufficient problem without dragging in the rest of the family.
When the future lyrist was fifteen months old his father, Nicholas Herrick, made his will, and immediately fell out of an upper window.
Whether or not this fall was an intended sequence to the will, the high almoner, Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in his claim to the estate, "all goods and chattels of suicides" becoming his by law.
The circ.u.mstances were suspicious, though not conclusive, and the good bishop, after long litigation, consented to refer the case to arbitrators, who awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds, thus leaving the question at issue--whether or not Herrick"s death had been his own premeditated act--still wrapped in its original mystery. This singular law, which had the possible effect of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide among well-to-do persons of the lower and middle cla.s.ses, was afterward rescinded.
Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household dest.i.tute, for his estate amounted to five thousand pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand pounds in to-day"s money; but there were many mouths to feed. The poet"s two uncles, Robert Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor, the latter subsequently knighted (1) for his usefulness as jeweller and money-lender to James I., were appointed guardians to the children.
(1) Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial Introduction to Herrick"s poems, quotes this curious item from Win-wood"s _Manorials of Affairs of State_: "On Easter Tuesday [1605], one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King cloth wear. The party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as won the King to an extraordinary liking of it."
Young Robert appears to have attended school in Westminster until his fifteenth year, when he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had learned the gentle art of goldsmith from his nephew"s father. Though Robert"s indentures bound him for ten years, Sir William is supposed to have offered no remonstrance when he was asked, long before that term expired, to cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner at St. John"s College. At the end of two years he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a view to economy and the pursuit of the law--the two frequently go together. He received his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in 1620, having relinquished the law for the arts.
During this time he was a.s.sumed to be in receipt of a quarterly allowance of ten pounds--a not illiberal provision, the pound being then five times its present value; but as the payments were eccentric, the master of arts was in recurrent distress. If this money came from his own share of his father"s estate, as seems likely, Herrick had cause for complaint; if otherwise, the pith is taken out of his grievance.
The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture is told in a few chance-preserved letters written to his "most careful uncle," as he calls that evidently thrifty person. In one of these monotonous and dreary epistles, which are signed "R. Hearick," the writer says: "The essence of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat you to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson, bookseller, in Paule"s Churchyarde, the ordinarie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges in the natural wish that his college bills "had leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in 1617. The young man"s patrimony, whatever it may have been, had dwindled, and he confesses to "many a throe and pinches of the purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects were not flattering.
Robert Herrick"s means of livelihood, when in 1620 he quitted the university and went up to London, are conjectural. It is clear that he was not without some resources, since he did not starve to death on his wits before he discovered a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but perhaps not less useful, allies in the persons of Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through the two New Year anthems, honored by the music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty"s organist at Westminster, it is more than possible that Herrick was brought to the personal notice of Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a promise of success, but not success itself. It has been thought probable that Herrick may have secured some minor office in the chapel at Whitehall.
That would accord with his subsequent appointment (September, 1627,) as chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham"s unfortunate expedition of the Isle of Rhe.
Precisely when Herrick was invested with holy orders is not ascertainable. If one may draw an inference from his poems, the life he led meanwhile was not such as his "most careful uncle" would have warmly approved. The literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some of whose blithe measures, pa.s.sing in ma.n.u.script from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun were not places devoted to worship, unless it were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson," at whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other blossoming young poets of the season. He was a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed many loving lyrics to the master, of which not the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:
When I a verse shall make, Know I have praid thee For old religion"s sake, Saint Ben, to aide me.
Make the way smooth for me, When I, thy Herrick, Honouring thee, on my knee Offer my lyric.
Candles I"ll give to thee, And a new altar; And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be Writ in my Psalter.
On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the recommending of the Earl of Exeter, presented Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined to pa.s.s the next nineteen years of his life among surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be a mile away from London stone was for Herrick to be in exile. Even with railway and telegraphic interruptions from the outside world, the dullness of a provincial English town of today is something formidable. The dullness of a sequestered English hamlet in the early part of the seventeenth century must have been appalling. One is dimly conscious of a belated throb of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however discontented or unhappy he may have been at first in that lonely vicarage, the world may congratulate itself on the circ.u.mstances that stranded him there, far from the distractions of the town, and with no other solace than his Muse, for there it was he wrote the greater number of the poems which were to make his fame. It is to this accidental banishment to Devon that we owe the cl.u.s.ter of exquisite pieces descriptive of obsolete rural manners and customs--the Christmas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the morris-dances, and the May-day festivals.
The November following Herrick"s appointment to the benefice was marked by the death of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy than "a ringe of twenty shillings." Perhaps this was an understood arrangement between them; but it is to be observed that, though Herrick was a spendthrift in epitaphs, he wasted no funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter of verse he dealt generously with his family down to the latest nephew.
One of his most charming and touching poems is ent.i.tled To His Dying Brother, Master William Herrick, a posthumous son. There appear to have been two brothers named William. The younger, who died early, is supposed to be referred to here.
The story of Herrick"s existence at Dean Prior is as vague and bare of detail as the rest of the narrative. His parochial duties must have been irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he wore his ca.s.sock lightly. As a preparation for ecclesiastical life he forswore sack and poetry; but presently he was with the Muse again, and his farewell to sack was in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Herrick had probably accepted the vicarship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in a troop of horse--with an eye to present emolument and future promotion. The promotion never came, and the emolument was nearly as scant as that of Goldsmith"s parson, who considered himself "pa.s.sing rich with forty pounds a year"--a height of optimism beyond the reach of Herrick, with his expensive town wants and habits. But fifty pounds--the salary of his benefice--and possible perquisites in the way of marriage and burial fees would enable him to live for the time being. It was better than a possible nothing a year in London.
Herrick"s religious convictions were a.s.suredly not deeper than those of the average layman. Various writers have taken a different view of the subject; but it is inconceivable that a clergyman with a fitting sense of his function could have written certain of the poems which Herrick afterward gave to the world--those astonishing epigrams upon his rustic enemies, and those habitual bridal compliments which, among his personal friends, must have added a terror to matrimony. Had he written only in that vein, the posterity which he so often invoked with pathetic confidence would not have greatly troubled itself about him.
It cannot positively be a.s.serted that all the verses in question relate to the period of his inc.u.mbency, for none of his verse is dated, with the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace and Lydia. The date of some of the compositions may be arrived at by induction. The religious pieces grouped under the t.i.tle of n.o.ble Numbers distinctly a.s.sociate 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 a.s.sured that he may read Herrick"s poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. "For unconscious impiety," remarks Mr. Edmund Gosse, (1) "this rivals the famous pa.s.sage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted G.o.d to "pause and think."" Elsewhere, in an apostrophe to "Heaven," Herrick says:
Let mercy be So kind to set me free, And I will straight Come in, or force the gate.
In any event, the poet did not purpose to be left out!
(1) In _Seventeenth-Century Studies_. and the general absence of arrangement in the "Hesperides," Dr. Grosart advances the theory that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on these points. Dr. Grosart a.s.sumes that Herrick kept the epigrams and personal tributes in ma.n.u.script books separate from the rest of the work, which would have made a too slender volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender-ness was induced to trust the two collections to the publisher, "whereupon he or some un-skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these additions with the others. That the poet him-self had nothing to do with the arrangement or disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an amiable supposition, but merely a supposition.
Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces, Herrick personally placed the "copy" in the hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, and if he were over-persuaded to allow them to print unfit verses, and to observe no method whatever in the contents of the book, the discredit is none the less his. It is charitable to believe that Herrick"s coa.r.s.eness was not the coa.r.s.eness of the man, but of the time, and that he followed the fashion _malgre lui_. With regard to the fairy poems, they certainly should have been given in sequence; but if there are careless printers, there are also authors who are careless in the arrangement of their ma.n.u.script, a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was wholly unpractised, and might easily have made mistakes. The "Hesperides" was his sole publication.
Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. Of his personal appearance at this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to the original edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. 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. It is interesting to note that this same Marshall engraved the head of Milton for the first collection of his miscellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volume containing Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. The plate gave great offense to the serious-minded young Milton, not only because it represented him as an elderly person, but because of certain minute figures of peasant lads and la.s.sies who are very indistinctly seen dancing frivolously under the trees in the background. Herrick had more reason to protest. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artist lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionally hurled the ma.n.u.script of his sermon at the heads of his drowsy parishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has the aspect of one meditating a.s.sault 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.
He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the Bishop of Lincoln"s imprisonment--a poem full of deference and tenderness for a person who had evidently injured the writer, probably by opposing him in some affair of church preferment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "became much beloved by the gentry in these parts for his florid and witty (wise) discourses." It appears that he was fond of animals, and had a pet spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away without a couplet attached to him:
Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see For shape and service spaniell like to thee.
Among the exile"s chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia"s sparrow, much to the latter"s disadvantage. All of Herrick"s geese were swans. On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick"s successor at Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he had taught to drink out of a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admirably qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her ninety-ninth year when she communicated this fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the paper on Herrick published in the "Quarterly Review" for August, 1810, and in the Boston edition (1) of the "Hesperides" attributed to Southey.
(1) The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi-cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living "in habits of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her-rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for Jonson had been dead eleven years.
What else do we know of the vicar? A very favorite theme with Herrick was Herrick. Scattered through his book are no fewer than twenty-five pieces ent.i.tled On Himself, not to mention numberless autobiographical hints under other captions. They are merely hints, throwing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes, and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical personage without any very definite outlines might be evolved from these fragments. 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. In one place Herrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what would have been Pepys"s manner had Pepys written verse), and in another place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne"s _concetti_:
One of the five straight branches of my hand Is lopt already, and the rest but stand Expecting when to fall, which soon will be: First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.
With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understood and loved music. None but a lover could have said:
The mellow touch of musick most doth wound The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice, As could they hear, the d.a.m.n"d would make no noise, But listen to thee walking in thy chamber Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
. . . Then let me lye Entranc"d, and lost confusedly; And by thy musick stricken mute, Die, and be turn"d into a lute.
Herrick never married. His modest Devonshire establishment was managed by a maidservant named Prudence Baldwin. "Fate likes fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick"s maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber of what may be called a joyous little threnody:
In this little urne is laid Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid; From whose happy spark here let Spring the purple violet.
Herrick addressed a number of poems to her before her death, which seems to have deeply touched him in his loneliness. We shall not allow a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flippancy of an old writer who says that "Prue was but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse." She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note of sincerity not usual with him:
These summer birds did with thy master stay The times of warmth, but then they flew away, Leaving their poet, being now grown old, Expos"d to all the coming winter"s cold.
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide As well the winter"s as the summer"s tide: For which thy love, live with thy master here Not two, but all the seasons of the year.
Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mistress Prew!
In spite of Herrick"s disparagement of Deanbourn, which he calls "a rude river," and his characterization of Devon folk as "a people currish, churlish as the seas," the fullest and pleasantest days of his life were probably spent at Dean Prior. He was not unmindful meanwhile of the gathering political storm that was to shake England to its foundations.
How anxiously, in his solitude, he watched the course of events, is attested by many of his poems. This solitude was not without its compensation. "I confess," he says,
I ne"er invented such Enn.o.bled numbers for the presse Than where I loath"d so much.
A man is never wholly unhappy when he is writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced that each new lyric was a stone added to the pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of relief was tinged with indefinable regret when he found himself suddenly deprived of his benefice. The integrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was not given the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman with p.r.o.nounced Cromwellian views.
Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habiliments, and hastened to London to pick up such as were left of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once more he would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe the air breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I" the mouth too." In the gladness of getting back "from the dull confines of the drooping west," he writes a glowing apostrophe to London--that "stony stepmother to poets." He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with justness, that Herrick"s family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but among them was not poverty.
The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few weeks following his return to London they were issued in a single volume with the t.i.tle "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq."
The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the commonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare himself was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural," says Mr.
Palgrave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical; he had not the learned polish, the political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were then and onward demanded from poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have written Corinna"s Going a-Maying, or approached in kind the ineffable grace and perfection to be found in a score of Herrick"s lyrics?