observe no method whatever in the contents of the book, the discredit is
none the less his. It is charitable to believe that Herrick's coarseness
was not the coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that he followed
the fashion _malgre lui_. With regard to the fairy poems, they certainly
should have been given in sequence; but if there are careless printers,
there are also authors who are careless in the arrangement of their
manuscript, a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was wholly
unpractised, and might easily have made mistakes. The "Hesperides" was
his sole publication.

Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age. Of his personal appearance
at this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to the
original edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. Whether or
not the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet,
it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on
that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interesting to
note that this same Marshall engraved the head of Milton for the
first collection of his miscellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volume
containing Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc. The plate gave great
offense to the serious-minded young Milton, not only because it
represented him as an elderly person, but because of certain minute
figures of peasant lads and lassies who are very indistinctly seen
dancing frivolously under the trees in the background. Herrick had more
reason to protest. The aggressive face bestowed upon him by the artist
lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the vicar occasionally
hurled the manuscript of his sermon at the heads of his drowsy
parishioners, accompanying the missive with pregnant remarks. He has the
aspect of one meditating assault and battery.

To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiability
of the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings.
He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the Bishop of Lincoln's
imprisonment--a poem full of deference and tenderness for a person
who had evidently injured the writer, probably by opposing him in some
affair of church preferment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "became much
beloved by the gentry in these parts for his florid and witty (wise)
discourses." It appears that he was fond of animals, and had a pet
spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away without a couplet attached
to him:

N