Herrick appears in his poetry, if we leave out of consideration the inferior religious verse in Noble Numbers, mainly in three characters. He is the cheerful countryman, the praiser of his mistresses, and the philosopher of the mortality of pretty things. As for the first, he was too good a disciple of Horace not to be able to play the part cheerfully and to smile among his animals and his beans:
A hen
I keep, which, creaking day by day,
Tells when
She goes her long white egg to lay.
A lamb
I keep (tame) with my morsels fed,
Whose dam
An orphan left him (lately dead) ...
A cat