I HERRICK Herrick was a gross and good-natured clergyman who had a double chin. He kept a pet pig, which drank beer out of a tankard, and he and the pig had probably a good many of the same characteristics. It would be a libel on him to say that he was a pig, but it would not be a libel to say that he was a pet pig. His life, like the pet pig's, was not real, and it certainly was not earnest. He spent the best part of his youth mourning over the brevity of life, and he lived till he was comfortably over eighty. He was an Epicurean, indeed, in the vulgar sense of the word, whose dominant theme was the mortality of pretty things. For Herrick gives us the feeling that for him the world was a world of pretty things rather than of beautiful things. He was the son of a goldsmith in Cheapside, and himself served an apprenticeship to the trade. The effect of this may, I think, be seen in his verse. His spiritual home always remained in Cheapside rather than in the Church which he afterwards entered. He enjoyed the world as though it were a street of shops. To read him is to call at the florist's and the perfumer's and the milliner's and the jeweller's and the confectioner's and the vintner's and the fruiterer's and the toy-seller's. If he writes, as he proclaims, of bridegrooms and brides, he does not forget the bride's dress or the bride's cake. His very vision of Nature belittles it to the measure of "golden Cheapside." He begins Fair Days with the lines: Fair was the dawn; and but e'en now the skies If he invites Phyllis to love him and live with him in the country, he reduces the hills for her to the size of bric-a-brac: Thy feasting-tables shall be hills With daisies spread, and daffodils. He was one of those happily constituted men who can get pleasure from most things, and it is obvious that he got a great deal of pleasure from his life in Devonshire, where he was Vicar of Dean Prior, till he was ejected after the triumph of Cromwell in the Civil War. But his heart was never in Devonshire. There is no mirror |