roline poetry, beginning, it may
be, a little before the accession of Charles I., but terminating as a
producing period almost before the real accession of his son. The poets of
this period, in which but not of which Milton is, are numerous and
remarkable, and at the head of them all stands Robert Herrick.

Very little is really known about Herrick's history. That he was of a
family which, distinguished above the common, but not exactly reaching
nobility, had the credit of producing, besides himself, the indomitable
Warden Heyrick of the Collegiate Church of Manchester in his own times, and
the mother of Swift in the times immediately succeeding his, is certain.
That he was born in London in 1591, that he went to Cambridge, that he had
a rather stingy guardian, that he associated to some extent with the tribe
of Ben in the literary London of the second decade of the century, is also
certain. At last and rather late he was appointed to a living at Dean Prior
in Devonshire, on the confines of the South Hams and Dartmoor. He did not
like it, being of that class of persons who cannot be happy out of a great
town. After the Civil War he was deprived, and his successor had not the
decency (the late Dr. Grosart, constant to his own party, made a very
unsuccessful attempt to defend the delinquent) to pay him the shabby
pittance which the intruders were supposed to furnish to the rightful
owners of benefices. At the Restoration he too was restored, and survived
it fifteen years, dying in 1674; but his whole literary fame rests on work
published a quarter of a century before his death, and pretty certainly in
great part written many years earlier.

The poems which then appeared were divided, in the published form, into two
classes: they may be divided, for purposes of poetical criticism, into
three. The _Hesperides_ (they are dated 1648, and the _Noble Numbers_ or
sacred poems 1647; but both appeared together) consist in the first place
of occasional poems, sometimes amatory, sometimes not; in the second, of
personal epigrams. Of this second class no human being who has any faculty
of criticism can say any good. They are supposed by tradition to have been
composed on parishioners: they may be hoped by charity (which has in this
case the support of literary criticism) to be merely literary
exercises--bad imitations of Martial, through Ben Jonson. They are nastier
than the nastiest work of Swift; they are stupider than the stupidest