Than where I loath'd so much.

A man is never wholly unhappy when he is writing verses. Herrick was
firmly convinced that each new lyric was a stone added to the pillar of
his fame, and perhaps his sense of relief was tinged with indefinable
regret when he found himself suddenly deprived of his benefice. The
integrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was not
given the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected the
panegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior,
and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman with
pronounced Cromwellian views.

Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discarded
his clerical habiliments, and hastened to London to pick up such as were
left of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once more
he would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe the
air breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden,
and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I' the mouth
too." In the gladness of getting back "from the dull confines of the
drooping west," he writes a glowing apostrophe to London--that "stony
stepmother to poets." He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud
to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers,
Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and
fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with
justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential,
would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic
tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of
the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but
among them was not poverty.

The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few
weeks following his return to London they were issued in a single volume
with the title "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of
Robert Herrick, Esq."

The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the
commonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare himself was to lie
in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had
strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singing
creature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural," says Mr.
Palgrave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical; he had not the learned
polish, the poli