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to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing, with justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential, would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royal- istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but among them was not poverty. The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few weeks following his return to London they were issued in a sin- gle volume with the title "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq." The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the commonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare him- self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age-- a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural," says Mr. Pal- grave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical; he had not the learned polish, the political al- lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were then and onward demanded from poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the half-century that followed the Restoration, could have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap- proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec- tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics? The "Hesperides" was received with chilling indifference. None of Herrick's great contem- poraries has left a consecrating word concerning it. The book was not reprinted during the au- thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1796 the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake published in his "Literary Hours" three critical papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ- ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives of the Poets," though space was found for half a score of poetasters whose names are to be found nowhere else. In 1810 Dr. Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections. It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him. In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful that some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand- ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant; the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun make no reference to him; <1> and in the wide parenthesis formed by his birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discover- able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty- two years. Here is material for profundity and ciphers! Herrick's second sojourn in London covered the period between 1648 and 1662, curing which interim he fades from sight, excepting for the

<1> With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the Musarum Deliciae (1656) who mentions

That old sack Young Herrick took to entertain The Muses in a sprightly vein. instant when he is publishing his book. If he engaged in further literary work there are no evidences of it beyond one contribution to the "Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649. He seems to have had lodgings, for a while at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the merry London of his early manhood. Time and war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting. Ben Jonson