ROBERT, a popular English poet, was born in London, August 20th, 1591. He was of an ancient and considerable family in Leicestershire. For centuries the Herricks had possessed the manors of Stretton and Houghton-on-the-Hill; and settling in the town of Leicester at Herrick, the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII., they gave a succession of mayors and parliamentary representatives to the borough. The literary honours of the race were not confined to the author of the Hesperides; from a branch of the same family was descended the mother of Dean Swift. Nicholas Herrick, the poet's father, being a younger son, removed to London, and commenced business in Cheapside as a goldsmith and banker. He died in 1592, leaving five children, of whom Robert was the fourth. Robert was indebted for a learned education to a rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, a man of abilities and address, who held offices of trust under Elizabeth and James, and was knighted in 1605. Sir William entered his nephew as a fellow-commoner of St John's College, Cambridge, in 1613. The latter afterwards removed to Trinity Hall, intending to study law; but he seems to have soon abandoned this intention, and, taking his degree of M.A., was presented by Charles I. to the vicarage of Dean Prior, near Totness, in Devonshire. Herrick was then thirty-eight years of age. He was probably known as a poet, and he had been a guest at the lyric feasts of Ben Jonson—

"Made at the Sun, The Dog and Triple Tun, Where we such clusters had As made us nobly wild, not mad."

Such a brilliant town life was not fitted to recommend that of a poor vicar in a remote country parish, and Herrick appears to have been disgusted with "dull Devonshire," and with his parishioners, whom he describes as rude savages, "churchless as the seas." Even the rocky and picturesque scenery of the place comes in for a share of his vituperation. He admits, however, that he wrote his best poetry there, and much of it is devoted to praise of a country life. He paints in lively colours the charms of the rural May-day, village wakes, the harvest-home and Christmas revels, the herd whistling at the plough, the meadow enamelled with cowslips, and the autumn wain laden with its nodding sheaves. He solaced himself also by framing poetical postures for a string of imaginary beauties—his Julia, Antha, Corinna, Electra, &c.; but Philips says he was "not particularly influenced by any nymph or goddess, except his maid Prue." Indeed, it is easy to see that in these curious and passionless love verses Herrick merely copied the fashionable style of poetic gallantry which had been common among the amatory and cavalier poets from the time of Lyly, Lodge, and others of the elegant Elizabethan versifiers. His praise of his housemaid Prue—

"Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste"—was probably sincere. She had stayed with him, he says, till he had grown old, after all the summer birds had flown; and though "the grange" or parsonage at Dean Prior was humble enough (not even boasting a clock, to tell how night drew on), he and Prue were content with their humble Epicurean privacy, living on "their own," and having no fear of landlord or usurer to disturb their slumbers. The small establishment, however, was broken up by the storms of the Civil War. The Long Parliament ejected Herrick from his vicarage, and he flew, ravished in spirit, as he tells us, from loathed Devonshire to London, "the blest place of his nativity." Here, however, he found fresh cause for discontent and grief. He was reduced to depend solely on the generosity of his relatives and that of his brothers in misfortune, the cavaliers. He published his poems; his Noble Numbers in 1647, and his Hesperides, or Works Humane and Divine, in 1648. He mixed with the wits and poets of the time. Ben Jonson was gone, but he numbered among his friends Charles Cotton (a congenial spirit), the learned Selden, Sir John Denham, and Henry Lawes, who set some of his pieces to music, as he had previously done the lyrics in Milton's Comus. To all of these, and to most of the royalist nobiles, Herrick addressed encomiastic verses. His works he dedicated to "the most illustrious and most hopeful Prince Charles," afterwards Charles II. His loyalty and sufferings merited reward when the Restoration came, but nothing better was done for Herrick than restoring him to his vicarage in Devonshire, which was probably welcome to him as a quiet retreat, for he was then bordering upon seventy. He lived fourteen more years; and the parish register of Dean Prior records that "Robert Herrick, vicker," was buried on the 15th of October 1674.

The works of Herrick have been often reprinted, both in an entire and a selected form. They consist of a multitude of small pieces classified under various heads—as pastoral and descriptive, amatory odes, aphorisms, anaecrotic and bacchanalian, moral and pathetic, &c. His best inspiration, like that of Anacreon, spring from wine, beauty, and flowers. He is often indelicate—gross in taste rather than licentious, and has many puerile and ridiculous conceits. He sometimes steals from his contemporaries. One short poem is servilely copied from a beautiful lyric in Ben Jonson's Epicoene; another is taken from Suckling; and there are imitations of Raleigh and others. He has no poem so fine as Cowley's Chronicle or Grasshopper, or Suckling's Wedding; and the exquisite snatches of verse, so full of classic grace and polish, scattered through Jonson's masques and plays, are of a higher mood than anything in Herrick. Perhaps in rural description he must also yield to another Devonshire poet of that period—Browne, author of Britannia's Pastorals. But Herrick's airy voluptuous style is decidedly original. His gaiety was of the heart, and was irrepressible. Some of his lyrics are so melodious as scarcely to require the aid of music to be sung; and his best pieces—as Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may; Cherry Ripe; To Blossoms; the Parliament of Roses (he has fairly exhausted the vocabulary of roses and kisses); To Anthea, who may command him, &c.—are of the real essence of poetry, unsurpassed for delicacy of sentiment and refined gallantry. (n. c. s.)