The mention of Herrick's 'Temple' or 'Book' of his heroes has led us to gossip first of the less interesting half of his life which followed on his acceptance of a country living. The nine or ten years which passed between his leaving Cambridge and his retirement to Devonshire were probably the most poetically productive in all his career, and, from the glimpses which his poems give us, were certainly the gayest and most amusing.
He had gone to the University unusually late in life, in 1613 when he was already in his twenty-first year, that is to say, five or six years senior to the average freshman of those days. After his father's suicide (for the fall from a window following immediately on making his will can hardly have been accidental, and was not so regarded at the time) the care of the poet and his brothers had devolved on their uncles Robert and William, and the latter, who was jeweller, goldsmith, and banker to James I., shortly after receiving the honour of knighthood from the King, on September 25, 1607, accepted his nephew as an apprentice for ten years. Herrick's appreciation of material beauty was so keen that the absence from his poems (so far as my memory serves me) of any striking allusions to goldsmith's work may perhaps be taken as evidence that during his apprenticeship with his uncle he did not make any great progress in the craft. At all events he persuaded Sir William to excuse him the last four years of his time, and betook himself to Cambridge, the poets' University.
Fourteen letters which he wrote to his uncle from his college still survive, all written in a high-flown rhetorical style, sometimes lapsing into blank verse, and with one unvarying theme,—the need of a prompt remittance. His allowance was £40 a year (some £200 present value), probably paid out of the remnant of the £600 odd which came to him from his father's estate. This of itself was no bad 'stipend,' to use the poet's word, and from the tone of the letters we may guess that it was also supplemented by occasional gifts from his uncle and aunt. But it was apparently not paid regularly; Herrick was frequently in pecuniary straits, and about 1616 he migrated from St. John's to Trinity Hall in order to curtail his expenses, taking his bachelor's degree from the latter college in 1617.
It would be placing too touching a faith in under-graduate nature to attach much importance to the fact that the payments which Herrick requests were mostly to be made through booksellers, and that (save once when he confesses to having 'run somewhat deep into my tailor's debt') the need of books or the advancement of his studies are the pretexts mostly given for his requests for speedy payment. But there is no reason to imagine that Herrick's university career was an idle one. His poems show considerable traces of a knowledge and love of the classics. He translates from Virgil that charming passage which describes the meeting of Æneas with Venus clad as a simple huntress, is full of Horatian reminiscences, borrows a few couplets from Ovid, adapts quite a number of epigrams from Martial, makes so much use of his Catullus that we may guess he knew a fair number of his odes by heart, quotes Cicero, turns a tag or two from Sallust and Tacitus, and had a very extensive acquaintance with Seneca. In Greek he takes a couplet from Hesiod as a motto for his 'Noble Numbers,' alludes to Homer, though his reference to Helen at the Scaean Gate is perhaps rather from the 'Love Letters' of Aristaenetus than the Iliad, translates some twenty lines of Theocritus into the pretty poem entitled 'The Cruel Maid,' knew something of the Planudean Anthology, and knew, loved, translated, and mitated the pseudo-Anacreon.
A fuller account of Herrick's indebtedness to Greek and Latin authors will be found in another paper. This brief survey of his classical studies may suffice to prove that he was no idler, and when he left the university and returned to town he must have been well able to hold his own with the best wits of the day. The well-known poem on 'His Age,' 'dedicated to his peculiar friend, Mr. John Weekes under the name of Posthumus,' contains in the printed version some vague reminiscences of their sportive days. In the Egerton MS. 2725 at the British Museum one verse of this poem mentions some of their old play-fellows:
'Then the next health to friends of mine
In oysters and Burgundian wine,
Hind, Goderiske, Smith,
And Nansagge,—'
acquaintances of the years ere yet Herrick had donned his parson's gown, and whose amatory powers he compares to those of Jove himself.