nt where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest.' .... But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.

The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.

When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizab