iments which, among his personal
friends, must have added a terror to matrimony. Had he written only
in that vein, the posterity which he so often invoked with pathetic
confidence would not have greatly troubled itself about him.

It cannot positively be asserted that all the verses in question relate
to the period of his incumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with
the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace and Lydia. The date of some
of the compositions may be arrived at by induction. The religious pieces
grouped under the title of Noble Numbers distinctly associate themselves
with Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very few of them are
"born of the royal blood." They lack the inspiration and magic of his
secular poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and grotesque as to
stir a suspicion touching the absolute soundness of Herrick's mind at
all times. The lines in which the Supreme Being is assured that he may
read Herrick's poems without taking any tincture from their sinfulness
might have been written in a retreat for the unbalanced. "For
unconscious impiety," remarks Mr. Edmund Gosse, (1) "this rivals the
famous passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted God to 'pause and
think.'" Elsewhere, in an apostrophe to "Heaven," Herrick says:

Let mercy be
So kind to set me free,
And I will straight
Come in, or force the gate.

In any event, the poet did not purpose to be left out!

(1) In _Seventeenth-Century Studies_. and the general
absence of arrangement in the "Hesperides," Dr. Grosart
advances the theory that the printers exercised arbitrary
authority on these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick
kept the epigrams and personal tributes in manuscript books
separate from the rest of the work, which would have made a
too slender volume by itself, and on the plea of this
slender-ness was induced to trust the two collections to the
publisher, "whereupon he or some un-skilled subordinate
proceeded to intermix these additions with the others. That
the poet him-self had nothing to do with the arrangement or
disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an amiable
supposition, but merely a supposition.

Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces, Herrick personally placed
the "copy" in the hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, and
if he were over-persuaded to allow them to print unfit verses, and to