of
Herrick prefixed to vol. i., all the references in this poem seem to
refer to Herrick's courtier-days, between leaving Cambridge and going to
Devonshire. He then, doubtless, resided in Westminster for the sake of
proximity to Whitehall. It has been suggested, however, that the
reference is to Westminster School, but we have no evidence that Herrick
was educated there.

_Golden Cheapside._ My friend, Mr. Herbert Horne, in his
admirably-chosen selection from the _Hesperides_, suggests that the
allusion here is to the great gilt cross at the end of Wood Street. The
suggestion is ingenious; but as Cheapside was the goldsmiths' quarter
this would amply justify the epithet, which may indeed only refer to
Cheapside as a money-winning street, as we might say Golden Lombard
Street.

1032. _Things are uncertain._ Tiberius, in Tacitus, _Annal._ i. 72:
Cuncta mortalium incerta; quantoque plus adeptus foret, tanto se magis
in lubrico.

1034. _Good wits get more fame by their punishment._ Cp. Tacit. _Ann._
iv. 35, sub fin.: Punitis ingeniis gliscit auctoritas, etc., quoted by
Bacon and Milton.

1035. _Twelfth Night: or King and Queen._ Herrick alludes to these
"Twelfth-Tide Kings and Queens" in writing to Endymion Porter (662), and
earlier still, in the "New-Year's Gift to Sir Simeon Steward" (319) he
speaks--

"Of Twelfth-Tide cakes, of Peas and Beans,
Wherewith ye make those merry scenes,
Whenas ye choose your King and Queen".

Brand (i. 27) illustrates well from "Speeches to the Queen at Sudley" in
Nichols' _Progresses of Queen Elizabeth_.

"_Melib[oe]us._ Cut the cake: who hath the bean shall be king, and where
the pea is, she shall be queen.

_Nisa._ I have the pea and must be queen.

_Mel._ I the bean, and king. I must command."

1045. _Comfort in Calamity._ An allusion to the ejection from their
benefices which befel most of the loyal clergy at the same time as
Herrick. It is perhaps worth noting that in the second volume of this
edition, and in the last hundred poems printed in the first, wherever a
date can be fixed it is always in the forties. Equally late poems occur,
though much less frequently, among the first five hundred, but there the
dated poems belong, for the most part, to the years 1623-1640. Now, in
April 29, 1640, as stated in the brief "Life" prefixed to vol. i., there
was entered at Stationers' Hall, "The severall poems written by Master
Robert Herrick," a book which, as far as i