, his Majesty's organist at
Westminster, it is more than possible that Herrick was brought to the
personal notice of Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a promise
of success, but not success itself. It has been thought probable that
Herrick may have secured some minor office in the chapel at Whitehall.
That would accord with his subsequent appointment (September, 1627,) as
chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortunate expedition of the Isle
of Rhe.

Precisely when Herrick was invested with holy orders is not
ascertainable. If one may draw an inference from his poems, the life he
led meanwhile was not such as his "most careful uncle" would have warmly
approved. The literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were open to a
free-lance like young Herrick, some of whose blithe measures, passing
in manuscript from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to light as
a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun were not places devoted to worship,
unless it were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson," at whose feet
Herrick now sat, with the other blossoming young poets of the season. He
was a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed many loving lyrics to
the master, of which not the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:

When I a verse shall make,
Know I have praid thee
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aide me.

Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.

Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my Psalter.

On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the recommending of the Earl of
Exeter, presented Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totnes,
in Devonshire. Here he was destined to pass the next nineteen years of
his life among surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be a mile away
from London stone was for Herrick to be in exile. Even with railway
and telegraphic interruptions from the outside world, the dullness of a
provincial English town of today is something formidable. The dullness
of a sequestered English hamlet in the early part of the seventeenth
century must have been appalling. One is dimly conscious of a belated
throb of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however discontented or
unhappy he may have been at first in that lonely vicarage, the world may
congratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded him there, far
from the distractions o