[488]. Shame is a bad attendant to a state. From Seneca, Hippol. 431: Malus est minister regii imperii pudor.
He rents his crown that fears the people's hate. Also from Seneca, Oedipus, 701: Odia qui nimium timet regnare nescit.
[496]. To his honoured kinsman, Sir Richard Stone, son of John Stone, sergeant-at-law, the brother of Julian Stone, Herrick's mother. He died in 1660.
To this white temple of my heroes. Ben Jonson's admirers were proud to call themselves "sealed of the tribe of Ben," and Herrick, a devout Jonsonite, seems to have imitated the idea so far as to plan sometimes, as here, a Temple, sometimes a Book (see infra, [510]), sometimes a City ([365]), a Plantation ([392]), a Calendar ([545]), a College ([983]), of his own favourite friends, to whom his poetry was to give immortality. The earliest direct reference to this plan is in his address to John Selden, the antiquary ([365]), in which he writes:—
"A city here of heroes I have made
Upon the rock whose firm foundation laid
Shall never shrink; where, making thine abode,
Live thou a Selden, that's a demi-god".
It is noteworthy that the poems which contain the clearest reference to this Temple (or its variants) are mostly addressed to kinsfolk, e.g., this to Sir Richard Stone, to Mrs. Penelope Wheeler, to Mr. Stephen Soame, and to Susanna and Thomas Herrick. Other recipients of the honour are Sir Edward Fish and Dr. Alabaster, Jack Crofts, Master J. Jincks, etc.
[497]. All flowers sent, etc. See Virgil's—or the Virgilian—Culex, ll. 397-410.
Martial's bee. See Epig. IV. xxxii.
De ape electro inclusa.
Et latet et lucet Phaethontide condita gutta,
Ut videatur apis nectare clausa suo.
Dignum tantorum pretium tulit illa laborum.
Credibile est ipsam sic voluisse mori.
[500]. To Mistress Dorothy Parsons. This "saint" from Herrick's Temple may certainly be identified with the second of the three children (William, Dorothy, and Thomasine) of Mr. John Parsons, organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, where he was buried in 1623. Herrick addresses another poem to her sister Thomasine:—