17.
"Then the next health to friends of mine
In oysters, and Burgundian wine,
Hind, Goderiske, Smith,
And Nansagge, sons of clune[M] and pith,
Such who know well
To board the magic bowl, and spill
All mighty blood, and can do more
Than Jove and Chaos them before."
This John Wickes or Weekes is spoken of by Anthony à Wood as a "jocular person" and a popular preacher. He enters Wood's Fasti by right of his co-optation as a D.D. in 1643, while the court was at Oxford; his education had been at Cambridge. He was a prebendary of Bristol and Dean of St. Burian in Cornwall, and suffered some persecution as a royalist. Herrick later on, when himself shedless and cottageless, addresses another poem to him as his "peculiar friend,"
To whose glad threshold and free door
I may, a poet, come, though poor.
A friend suggests that Hind may have been John Hind, an Anacreontic poet and friend of Greene, and has found references to a Thomas Goodricke of St. John's Coll., Camb., author of two poems on the accession of James I., and a Martin Nansogge, B.A. of Trinity Hall, 1614, afterwards vicar of Cornwood, Devon. Smith is certainly James Smith, who, with Sir John Mennis, edited the Musarum Deliciæ, in which the first poem is addressed "to Parson Weekes: an invitation to London," and contains a reference to—
"That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein".
The early part of this poem contains, along with the name Posthumus, many Horatian reminiscences: cp. especially II. Od. xiv. 1-8, and IV. Od. vii. 14. It may be noted that in the imitation of the latter passage in stanza iv. the MS. copy at the Museum corrects the misplacement of the epithet, reading:—
"But we must on and thither tend
Where Tullus and rich Ancus blend," etc.,
for "Where Ancus and rich Tullus".
Again the variant, "Open candle baudery," in verse 7, is an additional argument against Dr. Grosart's explanation: "Obscene words and figures made with candle-smoke," the allusion being merely to the blackened ceilings produced by cheap candles without a shade.