tical allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn,
which were then and onward demanded from poetry." Yet it is strange that
a public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet who
was fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then,
or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have written
Corinna's Going a-Maying, or approached in kind the ineffable grace and
perfection to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?

The "Hesperides" was received with chilling indifference. None of
Herrick's great contemporaries has left a consecrating word concerning
it. The book was not reprinted during the author's lifetime, and for
more than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In
1796 the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of the poems, and two years
later Dr. Nathan Drake published in his "Literary Hours" three critical
papers on the poet, with specimens of his writings. Dr. Johnson omitted
him from the "Lives of the Poets," though space was found for half a
score of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810
Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained
for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him.

In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful that
some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man
who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity
presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a handful
of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant;
the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun
make no reference to him; (1) and in the wide parenthesis formed by his
birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discoverable
in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-two years. Here is material
for profundity and ciphers!

(1) With the single exception of the writer of some verses
in the _Musarum Deliciae_ (1656) who mentions

That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein.

Herrick's second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648
and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting for
the instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in further
literary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution t