The great majority of Herrick's poems cannot be dated, and it is idle to enquire which were written before his ordination and which afterwards. His conception of religion was medieval in its sensuousness, and he probably repeated the stages of sin, repentance and renewed assurance with some facility. He lived with an old servant, Prudence Baldwin, the "Prew" of many of his poems; kept a spaniel named Tracy, and, so says tradition, a tame pig. When his parishioners annoyed him he seems to have comforted himself with epigrams on them; when they slumbered during one of his sermons the manuscript was suddenly hurled at them with a curse for their inattention.
In the same year that Herrick was appointed to his country vicarage his mother died while living with her daughter, Mercy, the poet's dearest sister (see [818]), then for some time married to John Wingfield of Brantham in Suffolk (see [590]), by whom she had three sons and a daughter, also called Mercy. His eldest brother, Thomas, had been placed with a Mr. Massam, a merchant, but as early as 1610 had retired to live a country life in Leicestershire (see [106]). He appears to have married a wife named Elizabeth, whose loss Herrick laments (see [72]). Nicholas, the next brother was more adventurous. He had become a merchant trading to the Levant, and in this capacity had visited the Holy Land (see [1100]). To his wife Susanna, daughter of William Salter, Herrick addresses two poems ([522] and [977]). There were three sons and four daughters in this family, and Herrick wrote a poem to one of the daughters, Bridget ([562]), and an elegy on another, Elizabeth ([376]). When Mrs. Herrick died the bulk of her property was left to the Wingfields, but William Herrick received a legacy of £100, with ten pounds apiece to his two children, and a ring of twenty shillings to his wife. Nicholas and Robert were only left twenty-shilling rings, and the administration of the will was entrusted to William Herrick and the Wingfields. The will may have been the result of a family arrangement, and we have no reason to believe that the unequal division gave rise to any ill-feeling. Herrick's address to "his dying brother, Master William Herrick" ([186]), shows abundant affection, and there is every reason to believe that it was addressed to the William who administered to Mrs. Herrick's will.
While little nephews and nieces were springing up around him, Herrick remained unmarried, and frequently congratulates himself on his freedom from the yoke matrimonial. He imagined how he would bid farewell to his wife, if he had one ([465]), and wrote magnificent epithalamia for his friends, but lived and died a bachelor. When first civil troubles and then civil war cast a shadow over the land, it is not very easy to say how he viewed the contending parties. He was devoted to Charles and Henrietta Maria and the young Prince of Wales, and rejoiced at every Royalist success. Many also of his poems breathe the spirit of unquestioning loyalty, but in others he is less certain of kingly wisdom. Something, however, must be allowed for his evident habit of versifying any phrase or epigram which impressed him, and not all his poems need be regarded as expressions of his personal opinions. But with whatever doubts his loyalty was qualified, it was sufficiently obvious to procure his ejection from his living in 1648; and, making the best of his loss, he bade farewell to Dean Prior, shook the dust of "loathed Devonshire" off his feet, and returned gaily to London, where he appears to have discarded his clerical habit and to have been made abundantly welcome by his friends.
Free from the cares of his incumbency, and free also from the restraints it imposed, Herrick's thoughts turned to the publication of his poems. As we have said, in his old Court-days these had found some circulation in manuscript, and in 1635 one of his fairy poems was printed, probably without his leave (see [Appendix]). In 1639 his poem ([575]) The Apparition of his Mistress calling him to Elysium was licensed at Stationers' Hall under the title of His Mistress' Shade, and it was included the next year in an edition of Shakespeare's Poems (see [Notes]). On April 29, 1640, "The severall poems written by Master Robert Herrick," were entered as to be published by Andrew Crook, but no trace of such a volume has been discovered, and it was only in 1648 that Hesperides at length appeared. Two years later upwards of eighty of the poems in it were printed in the 1650 edition of Witt's Recreations, but a small number of these show considerable variations from the Hesperides versions, and it is probable that they were printed from the poet's manuscript. Compilers of other miscellanies and song books laid Herrick under contribution, but, with the one exception of his contribution to the Lacrymæ Musarum in 1649, no fresh production of his pen has been preserved, and we know nothing further of his life save that he returned to Dean Prior after the Restoration (August 24, 1662), and that according to the parish register "Robert Herrick, Vicker, was buried ye 15th day October, 1674."
ALFRED W. POLLARD
NOTE TO SECOND EDITION.
In this edition some trifling errors, which had crept into the text and the numeration of the poems, have been corrected, and many fresh illustrations of Herrick's reading added in the notes, which have elsewhere been slightly compressed to make room for them. Almost all of the new notes have been supplied from the manuscript collections of a veteran student of Herrick who placed himself in correspondence with me after the publication of my first edition. To my great regret I am not allowed to make my acknowledgments to him by name.
A. W. P.