ow thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
For shape and service spaniell like to thee.

Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy he
also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's
disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority of
Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor at
Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he had
taught to drink out of a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admirably
qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her ninety-ninth year when she
communicated this fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the paper on
Herrick published in the "Quarterly Review" for August, 1810, and in the
Boston edition (1) of the "Hesperides" attributed to Southey.

(1) The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The
British Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and
chronologi-cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as
living "in habits of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If
that was the case, Her-rick must have taken up his quarters
in Westminster Abbey, for Jonson had been dead eleven years.

What else do we know of the vicar? A very favorite theme with Herrick
was Herrick. Scattered through his book are no fewer than twenty-five
pieces entitled On Himself, not to mention numberless autobiographical
hints under other captions. They are merely hints, throwing casual
side-lights on his likes and dislikes, and illuminating his vanity. A
whimsical personage without any very definite outlines might be evolved
from these fragments. I picture him as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with
perhaps less quaintness, and the poetical temperament added. Like the
prince of gossips, too, he somehow gets at your affections. In one place
Herrick laments the threatened failure of his eyesight (quite in what
would have been Pepys's manner had Pepys written verse), and in another
place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The quatrain treating of this
latter catastrophe is as fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's _concetti_:

One of the five straight branches of my hand
Is lopt already, and the rest but stand
Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.

With all his great show of candor Herrick really reveals as little of
himself as ever poet did. One thing, however, is manifest--he understood
and loved mus