a scarlet cloth,
A spinner's ham, the beards of mice,
Nits carbonadoed, a device
Before unknown; the blood of fleas,
Which gave his Elveship's stomach ease.
The unctuous dew-laps of a snail,
The broke heart of a nightingale
O'ercome in music, with the sag
And well-bestrutted bee's sweet bag.
Conserves of atoms, and the mites,
The silk-worm's sperm, and the delights
Of all that ever yet hath blest
Fairy-land: so ends his feast."

On the next page is printed: "Orpheus. Thrice excelling, for the
finishment of this Feast, thou must music it so that the Deities may
descend to grace it." This is succeeded by a page bearing a woodcut,
then we have "The Fairies Fegaries," a poem occupying three more pages
followed by another woodcut, and then "The Melancholly Lover's Song,"
and a third woodcut. The occurrence of the _Melancholy Lover's Song_
(the well-known lines beginning: "Hence all you vain delights") in print
in 1635 is interesting, as I believe that _The Nice Valour_, the play in
which they occur, was not printed till 1647, and Milton's _Il
Penseroso_, which they suggested, appeared in 1645. But the verses are
rather out of place in the little Fairy-Book.

APPENDIX III.

POOR ROBIN'S ALMANACK.

Herrick's name has been so persistently connected with _Poor Robert's
Almanack_ that a few words must be said on the subject. There is, we are
told, a Devonshire tradition ascribing the _Almanack_ to him, and this
is accepted by Nichols in his _Leicestershire_, and "accredited" by Dr.
Grosart. The tradition apparently rests on no better basis than
Herrick's Christian name, and of the poems in the issues of the
_Almanack_ which I have seen, it may be said, that, while the worst of
them, save for some lack of neatness of turn, might conceivably have
been by Herrick--on the principle that if Herrick could write some of
his epigrams, he could write anything--the more ambitious poems it is
quite impossible to attribute to the author of the _Hesperides_. But
apart from opinion, the negative evidence is overwhelming. Of the three
earliest issues in the British Museum, 1664, 1667 and 1669 (all in the
annual collections of Almanacs, issued by the Stationers' Company, and
all, it may be noted, bound for Charles II.), I transcribe the
title-page of the first. "Poor Robin. 1664. An Almanack After a New
Fashion wherein the Reader may see (if he be not blinde) many remarkable
thin