If thou to death or shame pursue 'em
Sanctibicetur nomen tuum.'
In a subsequent scene the Spirit takes the form of Katherine Carter, with whom Cuddy Banks is in love. On her appearing to him he remarks that he will teach her to walk so late! The teaching, however, was not on his side. She trips before him, and his exclamation as he quits the stage, 'Nay, by your leave I must embrace you,' is speedily followed by that quoted in the cut, 'Oh help, help, I am drown'd. I am drown'd.' The stage direction hereupon is 'Enter Wet,' and the dog, after four diabolic 'ha ha's,' bids him 'Take heed how thou trustest the Devil another time!' The tumbling into the water, it will be observed, like the murder of her children by Medea, was enacted behind the stage, probably because on the stage there was no means of simulating water to tumble into. In this case, therefore, the artist, a very rude one, it must be confessed, not only brought three scenes together, but depicted one which the audience could not have witnessed.
Our subject has been limited to woodcuts in old plays, but it should be noted that both the undated editions of Middleton's 'Game of Chess' have engraved title-pages of some merit. As for our woodcuts, I have tried to resist the temptation to claim for them more than they deserve. One or two of them are really good, several others at least interesting, a few, like that at which we have just been looking, poor stuff enough. But they are connected with the greatest period of the English drama, and it has been worth while to collect these notes, if only to show that this is the best that English artists could do, or English publishers had the enterprise to commission them to do, when they were confronted with so unique an opportunity.
[HERRICK AND HIS FRIENDS][21]
TO all but his professed admirers Herrick is chiefly known by a little handful of lyrics, which appear with great regularity in the anthologies, but bring with them a very incomplete impression of their author's personality and life. In the case of Herrick this is no great wonder. The same sensuous feeling which made him invest his friends with the perfume of Juno or Isis, sing of their complexions as roses overspread with lawn, compare their lips to cherries, and praise their silver feet, had also its other side. The unlucky wights who incurred the poet's wrath were treated in a fashion equally offensive to good taste and good manners. Nor are these gruesome epigrams the only apples in the garden of Herrick's 'Hesperides' which have affronted the taste of modern readers. The epigrams indeed, if apples at all, are rather the dusty apples of the Dead Sea than the pleasant fruit of the Western Isles; but Herrick's 'Epithalamia,' odes whose sustained splendour gives them a high rank among his poems, because they sing of other marriage-rites than those of rice and slipper, have also tended to restrict the circle of his readers in an age which prides itself on its modesty. Hence it has come about that while the names of the lovely ladies of the poet's imagination,—Julia, Dianeme, Electra, Perilla—are widely known, those of the men and women whom Herrick treasured as his friends are all but forgotten, and the materials for constructing a picture of the society amid which the poet moved have been neglected and thrown aside.
Like most bachelors, Herrick set a high value upon friendship, and in his sedater middle age, when his poetry had lost something of its fire, he set himself to construct a poetic temple to commemorate the virtues of the men and women whom he most loved or honoured. Sometimes instead of a temple he speaks of a book, sometimes his friends are his 'elect,' his 'righteous tribe,' language which recalls the 'sealed of the tribe of Ben' of his favourite Jonson. Inclusion among them was clearly reckoned as an honour, and many of the poems in which it is conferred were evidently written in response to solicitation, sportive or earnest as we may choose to think. These friends of his later days are not always very interesting. Many of them are of his relations, Herricks, or some of the innumerable Stones and Soames, well-to-do folk with whom the poet claimed cousinship through his mother, Julia Stone. Some of the outsiders are more to our purpose—John Selden the Antiquary, for instance, whose intimacy was no small honour, and Dr. Alabaster, who in his young days had become a convert to Catholicism while serving with Essex in Spain, but whose apocalyptic writings brought him into trouble with the Inquisition, from whose clutches he was glad to find refuge in a return to Protestantism and an English living. Mr. John Crofts, cup-bearer to the King, is another friend who brings with him a distinct sense of reality. Herrick calls him his 'faithful friend,' and their acquaintance was probably of long standing, for we hear of Crofts as in the King's service a year or two before the poet buried himself in his Devonshire living, and on the other hand all these 'Temple' poems impress us as having been written late in Herrick's life. In his younger days Crofts himself may have been a rhymester, for in the State Papers there is a letter from Lord Conway thanking William Weld for some verses, and expressing a hope that the lines may be 'strong enough to bind Robert Maule and Jack Crofts' from evermore using some phrase unknown. Mr. Crofts seems to have had worse faults than this of using incorrect phrases, for a year or two later (1634) there is a record of a petition from George, Lord Digby, praying to be released from an imprisonment incurred for assaulting Herrick's friend under very irritating provocation. Jack had passed some insult on a lady under Lord Digby's escort, had apologised, had boasted of the original offence, and when finally brought to book had interspersed remarks such as 'Well!' and 'What then?' in a manner which made caning seem too good for him. But this is the petitioner's account, and Jack himself might have given a different version.
Others of Herrick's friends seem occasionally to have got themselves into trouble. Dr. John Parry, for instance, Chancellor of the Diocese of Exeter, when first appointed, was accused of having oppressed divers people with excommunications for the sake of fees; but we hear of him afterwards as highly recommended by the Deputy-Lieutenants, and his early exactions must have been atoned to the King's satisfaction, since the chancellor was thought worthy to be made a judge-marshal, and to receive the honour of knighthood.
Many of Herrick's poems bear reference, direct or indirect, to the Civil War. He bewailed the separation of the King and Queen, welcomed Charles to the West in verse which sang the 'white omens' of his coming, congratulated him on his taking of Leicester in May, 1645, and composed an ode, 'To the King upon his welcome to Hampton Court,' in which he took all too cheerful a view of the royal prospects. His book is dedicated to Charles II., and it contains also an address 'To Prince Charlie upon his coming to Exeter,' which probably refers to a visit in 1645. Years before he had sung the Prince's birth in a pretty choral ode, taking note of the star which appeared at noontide when the King his father went to make thanksgiving at St. Paul's Cathedral. Two other incidents in the west-country campaign inspired his muse, the taking and holding of Exeter by Sir John Berkeley, and the gallant victories won in Cornwall by Lord Hopton over very superior numbers. For the rest there is nothing in the 'Hesperides' to show that Herrick was a bigoted royalist. Utterances in favour of the divine right of kings and the duty of implicit obedience are not hard to find; but they are balanced by epigrams which show a much more Parliamentary spirit, and it is often difficult to tell where Herrick is expressing his own sentiments and where he is simply running into verse some sentence or phrase which happened to catch his attention.
When the end came, Herrick, like many another country priest, was turned out of his living, shook the dust of Dean Prior off his feet, and returned contentedly to London, there to take his place in a little band of wits who were able to endure the gloom of the Presbyterian rule which then held the city in its grasp. He passed his 'Hesperides' and 'Noble Numbers' through the press, made friends with young John Hall, then fresh from Cambridge but with a European reputation for cleverness; addressed his 'honoured friend' Mr. Charles Cotton, probably the friend of Izaak Walton and translator of Montaigne; overpraised Leonard Willan, a wretched poet and dramatist, and contributed a curious poem to the 'Lachrymae Musarum,' in which, under the editorship of Richard Brome, all the wits of the day poured forth their lament for the death of Lord Hastings in 1649. Then Herrick vanishes from our sight, and save that he returned to his living after the Restoration and died there at Dean Prior in 1674 we know no more of him.