The following passage, which is an extract from an article in the Quarterly of August, 1809, by Mr. Barron Field, may be of some interest:—
Being in Devonshire during the last summer, we took an opportunity of visiting Dean Prior for the purpose of making some inquiries concerning Herrick, who, from the circumstance of having been vicar of that parish (where he is still talked of as a poet, a wit, and a hater of the county) for twenty years, might be supposed to have left some unrecorded memorials of his existence behind him. We found many persons in the village who could repeat some of his lines, and none who were not acquainted with his "Farewell to Dean Bourn"—
“Dean Bourn, farewell; I never look to see
Dean, or thy watry incivility,”
which, they said, he uttered as he crossed the brook upon being ejected by Cromwell from the Vicarage, to which he had been presented by Charles I. “But,” they added, with an air of innocent triumph, “he did see it again,” as was the fact after the Restoration. And, indeed, although he calls Devonshire “dull,” yet as he admits, at the same time, that “he never invented such ennobled numbers for the press as in that loathed spot,” the good people of Dean Prior have not much reason to be dissatisfied.
The person, however, who knows more of Herrick than all the rest of the neighbourhood, we found to be a poor woman in the ninety-ninth year of her age, named Dorothy King. She repeated to us, with great exactness, five of his Noble Numbers, among which was the beautiful Litany quoted above. These she had learned from her mother, who was apprenticed to Herrick’s successor in the vicarage. She called them her prayers, which, she said, she was in the habit of putting up in bed whenever she could not sleep, and she therefore began the Litany at the second stanza, “When I lie within my bed,” etc. Another of her midnight orisons was the poem beginning—
“Every night thou does me fright,
And keep mine eyes from sleeping,” etc.
She had no idea that these poems had ever been printed, and could not have read them if she had seen them. She is in possession of few traditions as to the person, manners, and habits of life of the poet, but in return she has a whole budget of anecdotes respecting his ghost, and these she details with a careless but serene gravity which one would not willingly discompose by any hints at a remote possibility of their not being exactly true. Herrick, she says, was a bachelor, and kept a maid-servant, as his poems, indeed, discover; but she adds, what they do not discover, that he also kept a pet pig, which he taught to drink out of a tankard. And this important circumstance, together with a tradition that he one day threw his sermon at the congregation, with a curse for their inattention, forms almost the sum total of what we could collect of the poet’s life.
F. H. Colson.