as I can find it, no matter what cherished images may break down. This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.* It was such a figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures. The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he taught to drink beer out of his own tankard; and an old parishioner, for whose story Anthony à Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when his little Devon congregation would not listen to him as he thought they ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the floor, and marched with tremendous stride out of church -home to fondle his pet pig. When Charles I. came to grief, and when the * Dr. Grosart objects that most portraits are too gross: I am content if comparison be made only with the engraving authorized by Dr. Grosart, and authenticated by his careful investigation and a warm admiration for his subject. Puritans began to sift the churches, this Royalist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles' execution at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publication was made of the Hesperides, or Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq.-his clerical title dropped. There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus ; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The "more's the pity" for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech. At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse : "For these my unbaptizèd rhymes Revolutionary Times. I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories. The writers of this particular period- some of whom I have named-fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.* The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit; humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration. Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, min * Herrick is not an example of this; but Herbert is; so is Overbury with his "Wife ;” so is Vaughan; so is Browne. strelsy, wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering support of great tranquillity and great national pride. In the days when the Armada was crushed, when British ships and British navigators brought every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to England's great Virgin Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity; the fever of Puritans against Anglicans, of Independents against Monarchy Men, is raging through all the land; pride in the kingship of such as James I. had broken down; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles I. has broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny gleams of poesy break in. There are colonies, too, planted over seas, and growing apace in these days, whither the eyes and thoughts of many of the bravest and clearest thinkers are turning. Even George Herbert, warmest of Anglicans, and of the noble house of Pembroke, was |