Herrick, ROBERT, a great English poet, was born in London, the fourth son and seventh child of a prosperous Cheapside goldsmith of good Leicestershire descent, and was baptised 24th August 1591. His father died the year after, not without suspicion of suicide, and the boy was bound apprentice for ten years to his uncle, afterwards Sir William Herrick, also a well-to-do Cheapside goldsmith. By September 1613, however, we find him a fellow-commoner at St John's College, Cambridge, whence he sent fourteen letters, still extant, to his guardian-uncle, who appears to have been stingy in his allowances of money. The last letter is dated from Trinity Hall, whither he writes he had migrated for economy. Herrick took his M.A. in 1620, and apparently came next to London, where, no doubt, he plunged heartily into the gaieties of the town, as well as 'those lyric feasts made at the Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun.' He was already a poet, and his 'wild, unbaptised rhymes' quickly earned him the friendship of Ben Jonson and his ring of hilarious spirits. In 1629 his mother died, and in the same year he took orders, and was presented to the sequestered living of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire. He bemoans his lonely banishment in 'loathèd country life' among 'currish' natives in 'dull Devonshire,' but from his poems we cannot doubt that his keen eye and kindly heart found him a consolation in the observation of the honest country-folk around him whose old-world customs are mirrored so charmingly in his verse. Of his clerical life we know but little, although Wood speaks of his 'florid and witty discourses,' and tells us he was 'beloved by the neighbouring gentry.' He has immortalised his housekeeper, 'Prue' or Prudence
Baldwin, as well as his spaniel 'Tracy,' and a tradition long survived of a 'favourite pig, which he amused himself by teaching to drink out of a tankard.' His 'Jnlia' is more visionary than these, but no doubt had her existence also. In 1647 the Puritan supremacy ejected him from his vicarage and drove him to London, whence he returned to reassume his duties in August 1662. Here twelve years later he died, being buried 15th October 1674. A monument was placed in the church in 1857.
Herrick's one volume of verse contained the Hesperides, dated 1648, and Noble Numbers, dated 1647. The last is a collection of professedly religious poetry; the former, an ill-arranged group of lyrical poems addressed to friends and eminent contemporaries, amatory poems, epithalamia, epigrams, fairy poems, and short occasional odes and poems on all kinds of subjects, of which sixty-two had already seen the light in Wit's Recreations (1640). The whole embrace more than 1200 poems of lengths varying from five or six pages to a single couplet, many of which are among the most exquisite examples of lyrical art in English. Of these it is enough to name 'Corinna's going a Maying,' 'The Mad Maid's Song,' 'The Night Piece to Julia' ('Her eyes the glow-worm lend thee'), 'To the Virgins' ('Gather ye rose-buds while ye may'), 'To Daffodils,' 'Cherry Ripe,' 'To Anthea' ('Bid me to live'); and, among religious poems, such masterpieces as 'The Litany,' 'The Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter,' and 'A Thanksgiving to God' ('Lord, thou hast given me a cell'). Much of his religious poetry is weak, but these are immortal. Yet the reader turns most often to his secular poems, in almost every line of which he will find a charm of a quite peculiar nature, save only in the epigrams, which are often poor and sometimes gross. The last laureate of fairy-land, his 'Fairie Temple,' 'Oberon's Feast,' and 'Oberon's Palace' were not unworthy to follow Shakespeare's Midsommer Night's Dream and Drayton's Nymphidia.
The Hesperides is one of the sunniest books in English literature, consummate in finish, exquisite in fancy, fresh and natural throughout, and rich in sweet and delightful pictures of the homely English country and the quaint, kindly, old-world customs of her folk. His love-poems are stamped with a real abandon that is not Horatian and not Anacreontic, but all his own, and ever throughout his joyousness the ear detects an undertone of melancholy. In unforced sweetness of melody and perfect harmony of sound and sense Herrick rises above all his brethren among the Caroline lyricists, and, indeed, follows closely in the steps of Shakespeare. Like the master he is thoroughly natural, unaffected, and English. We do not look for depth and intensity of passion in his work, but within his limits he attains perfection. The fresh fragrance of English meadows lives in his verse, and will beget perpetual delight as long as English literature is read. He sleeps secure of the eternity of fame for which he longed, and which he half-promised to himself.
After being neglected for more than a hundred years Herrick's poems were revived by Mr Nichols (Sylvanus Urban) in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1796 and 1797. Editions followed by Dr Nott (1810), T. Maitland (Lord Dundrennan, 1823), W. C. Hazlitt (1869), and Dr Grosart (3 vols. 1876, with an exhaustive memorial-introduction). See F. T. Palgrave's Chrysomela (1877), a selection by a fine critic, with a suggestive introduction; and Edmund W. Gosse's essay in Seventeenth-Century Studies (1883).