homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the

Inflata rore non Achaico verba

are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.

To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving
on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to
him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns
and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere,
making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other,
more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at
the same time new and r