Herrick and His Friends21
To all but his professed admirers Herrick is chiefly known by a little handful of lyrics, which appear with great regularity in the anthologies, but bring with them a very incomplete impression of their author’s personality and life. In the case of Herrick this is no great wonder. The same sensuous feeling which made him invest his friends with the perfume of Juno or Isis, sing of their complexions as roses overspread with lawn, compare their lips to cherries, and praise their silver feet, had also its other side. The unlucky wights who incurred the poet’s wrath were treated in a fashion equally offensive to good taste and good manners. Nor are these gruesome epigrams the only apples in the garden of Herrick’s ‘Hesperides’ which have affronted the taste of modern readers. The epigrams indeed, if apples at all, are rather the dusty apples of the Dead Sea than the pleasant fruit of the Western Isles; but Herrick’s ‘Epithalamia,’ odes whose sustained splendour gives them a high rank among his poems, because they sing of other marriage-rites than those of rice and slipper, have also tended to restrict the circle of his readers in an age which prides itself on its modesty. Hence it has come about that while the names of the lovely ladies of the poet’s imagination,—Julia, Dianeme, Electra, Perilla—are widely known, those of the men and women whom Herrick treasured as his friends are all but forgotten, and the materials for constructing a picture of the society amid which the poet moved have been neglected and thrown aside.
Like most bachelors, Herrick set a high value upon friendship, and in his sedater middle age, when his poetry had lost something of its fire, he set himself to construct a poetic temple to commemorate the virtues of the men and women whom he most loved or honoured. Sometimes instead of a temple he speaks of a book, sometimes his friends are his ‘elect,’ his ‘righteous tribe,’ language which recalls the ‘sealed of the tribe of Ben’ of his favourite Jonson. Inclusion among them was clearly reckoned as an honour, and many of the poems in which it is conferred were evidently written in response to solicitation, sportive or earnest as we may choose to think. These friends of his later days are not always very interesting. Many of them are of his relations, Herricks, or some of the innumerable Stones and Soames, well-to-do folk with whom the poet claimed cousinship through his mother, Julia Stone. Some of the outsiders are more to our purpose—John Selden the Antiquary, for instance, whose intimacy was no small honour, and Dr. Alabaster, who in his young days had become a convert to Catholicism while serving with Essex in Spain, but whose apocalyptic writings brought him into trouble with the Inquisition, from whose clutches he was glad to find refuge in a return to Protestantism and an English living. Mr. John Crofts, cup-bearer to the King, is another friend who brings with him a distinct sense of reality. Herrick calls him his ‘faithful friend,’ and their acquaintance was probably of long standing, for we hear of Crofts as in the King’s service a year or two before the poet buried himself in his Devonshire living, and on the other hand all these ‘Temple’ poems impress us as having been written late in Herrick’s life. In his younger days Crofts himself may have been a rhymester, for in the State Papers there is a letter from Lord Conway thanking William Weld for some verses, and expressing a hope that the lines may be ‘strong enough to bind Robert Maule and Jack Crofts’ from evermore using some phrase unknown. Mr. Crofts seems to have had worse faults than this of using incorrect phrases, for a year or two later (1634) there is a record of a petition from George, Lord Digby, praying to be released from an imprisonment incurred for assaulting Herrick’s friend under very irritating provocation. Jack had passed some insult on a lady under Lord Digby’s escort, had apologised, had boasted of the original offence, and when finally brought to book had interspersed remarks such as ‘Well!’ and ‘What then?’ in a manner which made caning seem too good for him. But this is the petitioner’s account, and Jack himself might have given a different version.
Others of Herrick’s friends seem occasionally to have got themselves into trouble. Dr. John Parry, for instance, Chancellor of the Diocese of Exeter, when first appointed, was accused of having oppressed divers people with excommunications for the sake of fees; but we hear of him afterwards as highly recommended by the Deputy-Lieutenants, and his early exactions must have been atoned to the King’s satisfaction, since the chancellor was thought worthy to be made a judge-marshal, and to receive the honour of knighthood.
Many of Herrick’s poems bear reference, direct or indirect, to the Civil War. He bewailed the separation of the King and Queen, welcomed Charles to the West in verse which sang the ‘white omens’ of his coming, congratulated him on his taking of Leicester in May, 1645, and composed an ode, ‘To the King upon his welcome to Hampton Court,’ in which he took all too cheerful a view of the royal prospects. His book is dedicated to Charles II., and it contains also an address ‘To Prince Charlie upon his coming to Exeter,’ which probably refers to a visit in 1645. Years before he had sung the Prince’s birth in a pretty choral ode, taking note of the star which appeared at noontide when the King his father went to make thanksgiving at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Two other incidents in the west-country campaign inspired his muse, the taking and holding of Exeter by Sir John Berkeley, and the gallant victories won in Cornwall by Lord Hopton over very superior numbers. For the rest there is nothing in the ‘Hesperides’ to show that Herrick was a bigoted royalist. Utterances in favour of the divine right of kings and the duty of implicit obedience are not hard to find; but they are balanced by epigrams which show a much more Parliamentary spirit, and it is often difficult to tell where Herrick is expressing his own sentiments and where he is simply running into verse some sentence or phrase which happened to catch his attention.
When the end came, Herrick, like many another country priest, was turned out of his living, shook the dust of Dean Prior off his feet, and returned contentedly to London, there to take his place in a little band of wits who were able to endure the gloom of the Presbyterian rule which then held the city in its grasp. He passed his ‘Hesperides’ and ‘Noble Numbers’ through the press, made friends with young John Hall, then fresh from Cambridge but with a European reputation for cleverness; addressed his ‘honoured friend’ Mr. Charles Cotton, probably the friend of Izaak Walton and translator of Montaigne; overpraised Leonard Willan, a wretched poet and dramatist, and contributed a curious poem to the ‘Lachrymae Musarum,’ in which, under the editorship of Richard Brome, all the wits of the day poured forth their lament for the death of Lord Hastings in 1649. Then Herrick vanishes from our sight, and save that he returned to his living after the Restoration and died there at Dean Prior in 1674 we know no more of him.
The mention of Herrick’s ‘Temple’ or ‘Book’ of his heroes has led us to gossip first of the less interesting half of his life which followed on his acceptance of a country living. The nine or ten years which passed between his leaving Cambridge and his retirement to Devonshire were probably the most poetically productive in all his career, and, from the glimpses which his poems give us, were certainly the gayest and most amusing.
He had gone to the University unusually late in life, in 1613 when he was already in his twenty-first year, that is to say, five or six years senior to the average freshman of those days. After his father’s suicide (for the fall from a window following immediately on making his will can hardly have been accidental, and was not so regarded at the time) the care of the poet and his brothers had devolved on their uncles Robert and William, and the latter, who was jeweller, goldsmith, and banker to James I., shortly after receiving the honour of knighthood from the King, on September 25, 1607, accepted his nephew as an apprentice for ten years. Herrick’s appreciation of material beauty was so keen that the absence from his poems (so far as my memory serves me) of any striking allusions to goldsmith’s work may perhaps be taken as evidence that during his apprenticeship with his uncle he did not make any great progress in the craft. At all events he persuaded Sir William to excuse him the last four years of his time, and betook himself to Cambridge, the poets’ University.
Fourteen letters which he wrote to his uncle from his college still survive, all written in a high-flown rhetorical style, sometimes lapsing into blank verse, and with one unvarying theme,—the need of a prompt remittance. His allowance was £40 a year (some £200 present value), probably paid out of the remnant of the £600 odd which came to him from his father’s estate. This of itself was no bad ‘stipend,’ to use the poet’s word, and from the tone of the letters we may guess that it was also supplemented by occasional gifts from his uncle and aunt. But it was apparently not paid regularly; Herrick was frequently in pecuniary straits, and about 1616 he migrated from St. John’s to Trinity Hall in order to curtail his expenses, taking his bachelor’s degree from the latter college in 1617.
It would be placing too touching a faith in under-graduate nature to attach much importance to the fact that the payments which Herrick requests were mostly to be made through booksellers, and that (save once when he confesses to having ‘run somewhat deep into my tailor’s debt’) the need of books or the advancement of his studies are the pretexts mostly given for his requests for speedy payment. But there is no reason to imagine that Herrick’s university career was an idle one. His poems show considerable traces of a knowledge and love of the classics. He translates from Virgil that charming passage which describes the meeting of Æneas with Venus clad as a simple huntress, is full of Horatian reminiscences, borrows a few couplets from Ovid, adapts quite a number of epigrams from Martial, makes so much use of his Catullus that we may guess he knew a fair number of his odes by heart, quotes Cicero, turns a tag or two from Sallust and Tacitus, and had a very extensive acquaintance with Seneca. In Greek he takes a couplet from Hesiod as a motto for his ‘Noble Numbers,’ alludes to Homer, though his reference to Helen at the Scaean Gate is perhaps rather from the ‘Love Letters’ of Aristaenetus than the Iliad, translates some twenty lines of Theocritus into the pretty poem entitled ‘The Cruel Maid,’ knew something of the Planudean Anthology, and knew, loved, translated, and mitated the pseudo-Anacreon.
A fuller account of Herrick’s indebtedness to Greek and Latin authors will be found in another paper. This brief survey of his classical studies may suffice to prove that he was no idler, and when he left the university and returned to town he must have been well able to hold his own with the best wits of the day. The well-known poem on ‘His Age,’ ‘dedicated to his peculiar friend, Mr. John Weekes under the name of Posthumus,’ contains in the printed version some vague reminiscences of their sportive days. In the Egerton MS. 2725 at the British Museum one verse of this poem mentions some of their old play-fellows:
‘Then the next health to friends of mine
In oysters and Burgundian wine,
Hind, Goderiske, Smith,
And Nansagge,—’
acquaintances of the years ere yet Herrick had donned his parson’s gown, and whose amatory powers he compares to those of Jove himself.
The identity of these heroes is not very easily determined. A friend suggests that Hind may have been John Hind, an Anacreontic poet and friend of Greene, and has found references to a Goderiske (Goodrich) and a Nansagge, of whom, however, only the names are known. Smith, despite the commonness of the name, may almost certainly be identified with James Smith, a poet whose few verses sometimes strike a curiously modern note. Like Herrick he acted at one time as chaplain to a squadron sent to the relief of the Isle of Rhé, and like Herrick also became a Devonshire parson. He was, too, one of the editors and writers of the Anthology known as ‘Musarum Deliciae,’ and his colleague in that task, the gallant royalist sailor, Sir John Mennis, was also a friend of Herrick, who addressed a poem to him. John Wicks, or Weekes, the ‘Posthumus’ of Herrick’s verses, was another friend of Mennis and Smith, and also a country clergyman. The first poem in the ‘Musarum Deliciae’ is addressed ‘To Parson Weeks; an invitation to London.’ ‘One friend?’ he is told—
‘Why thou hast thousands here
Will strive to make thee better cheer.
Ships lately from the islands came
With wines, thou never heard’st their name—
Montefiasco, Frontiniac,
Viatico and that old Sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein’—
an invitation which links together the names of all these topers. Weekes, however, so Antony Wood tells us, was a good preacher as well as a merry fellow. His living was in Cornwall, but he added to it a canonry at Bristol. Herrick addresses two other poems to him; one ‘a paraeneticall or advisive verse,’ beginning,
‘Is this a life to break thy sleep,
To rise as soon as day doth peep?
To tire thy patient ox or ass
By noon and let thy good days pass,
Not knowing this, that Jove decrees
Some mirth to adulce man’s miseries?’
lines which seem to show that Parson Weekes took the cultivation of his glebe somewhat too seriously. In the third poem he is again addressed as Herrick’s ‘peculiar friend,’ and having apparently come off better than most royalist parsons under the Commonwealth, is exhorted to hospitality:
‘Since shed or cottage I have none,
I sing the more that thou hast one,
To whose glad threshold and free door
I may a poet come, though poor,
And eat with thee a savoury bit,
Paying but common thanks for it.’
If Herrick made some friends among members of his own profession, his love of music probably procured him many more. He addresses poems to William and Henry Lawes, both of whom set verses of his to music; he alludes also to Dr. John Wilson, to Gaulthier, to Lanière, and to Robert Ramsay, in terms of familiarity. The last named, who ‘set’ his version of the dialogue between Horace and Lydia, may have been a Cambridge friend, as he was organist of Trinity College (1628-1634). With another organist, John Parsons of Westminster Abbey, who died in 1623, Herrick must have been acquainted very shortly after his return from Cambridge. Evidence of the friendship remains in two charming little poems addressed to the musician’s daughters, Dorothy and Thomasine:
‘If thou ask me, dear, wherefore
I do write of thee no more,
I must answer, sweet, thy part
Less is here than in my heart,’
are the lines which have given the elder sister immortality, while the attractions of the second are for ever celebrated in the couplet,—
‘Grow up in beauty, as thou dost begin
And be of all admired, Thomasine.’
Another family into which Herrick’s love of music was probably the key which gained him admission, was that of the Norgates. According to the ‘Calendars of State Papers,’ Edward Norgate the elder was in 1611 appointed, in conjunction with Andrea Bassano, to the office of tuner of the King’s virginals, organs, and other instruments; and six-and-twenty years later we find him superintending the repair of the organ in the chapel at Hampton Court. His son, another Edward, was originally a scrivener in the King’s service, and was employed ‘to write, limn and garnish with gold and colours’ the royal letters to a picturesque list of foreign potentates, including the Grand Signior, the King of Persia, the Emperor of Russia, the Great Mogul and other remote princes, such as the Kings of Bantam, Macassar, Barbary, Siam, Achee, Fez, and Sus. From scrivener he was raised to be Clerk of the Signet Extraordinary, and thence to be Windsor Herald, and to fill a variety of small offices of profit. Herrick addresses him as ‘the most accomplished gentleman, Master Edward Norgate, Clerk of the Signet to his Majesty,’ and remarks that
‘For one so rarely tun’d to fit all parts,
For one to whom espoused are all the arts,
Long have I sought for, but could never see
Them all concentered in one man but thee’—
a flattering tribute to the universality of Norgate’s talents.
We may pass now to some of Herrick’s patrons. His relations with the royal family we have already touched on, so nothing more need be said about them here. After the King, the Duke of Buckingham, whom he accompanied as chaplain to the Isle of Rhé, was probably the most influential of the poet’s protectors, and Herrick addresses an effusive poem to him, and a prettier one to his sister, Lady Mary Villiers. With the Earl of Westmoreland, himself the author of a volume of verse (‘Otia Sacra’), Herrick was probably on rather more intimate terms. He addresses poems also to the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the Earl of Pembroke (Massinger’s patron), Edward Earl of Dorset, Viscount Newark, and also to the Viscount’s son, whom he calls ‘Ultimus Heroum, or the most learned and the Right Honourable Henry Marquis of Dorchester.’ Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exeter (his diocesan), and Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, are the only episcopal recipients of his verses. He bespeaks the favour of the former for his book, while to the latter he addresses a carol and a congratulation on his release from imprisonment, in which he speaks obscurely of some ill-turn which Williams had done him. The list of lesser men of rank, knights and baronets, among Herrick’s friends is of about the same length. Sir Simeon Steward, who competed with him in writing fairy poems, is still remembered by literary antiquaries, and Sir John Denham, whom he congratulated on his ‘prospective poem’ (‘Cooper’s Hill’), is, of course, well known. But Sir Clipsby Crew, Sir Lewis Pemberton, Sir Edward Fish, Sir Thomas Heale, Sir Thomas Southwell, and other worthy magnates of the day, now only survive in Herrick’s verse and the indices to County Histories. Sir Clipsby Crew, to whom he addresses five poems (besides two to his lady), was probably the most intimate of these friends, as Herrick speaks of him as ‘My Crew,’ ‘My Clipsby,’ and after telling him how he and his friends ‘securely live and eat the cream of meat,’ quoting Anacreon and Horace the while, bids the ‘brave knight’ come to visit his cell, an invitation which implies familiarity. Yet it is to be feared that with all these good knights Herrick held the Elizabethan relation of poet to patron rather than a purely equal friendship. Various verses to Sir Clipsby Crew, Sir Lewis Pemberton, Mr. Kellan and others, show that Herrick loved to frequent a rich man’s table, and that when his own cellar was empty he was not slow to remind his friends that without Bacchus song is impossible. Herrick’s ducal patrons probably repaid his compliments in broad pieces, and even a plain commoner, Master Endymion Porter, is commended for his liberality to poets, in that he ‘not only praised but paid them too.’
This Endymion Porter is the last of Herrick’s friends with whom we shall concern ourselves, and in many respects the most interesting of them all. Originally in the service of Buckingham, he accompanied the Duke and Prince Charles on their visit to Spain, and passed into the latter’s service some time in the year 1624 as a groom of the chamber. He made himself useful to the King in many ways, and as early as May 1625 was granted a pension of £500 a year for life, and three years later was assigned the invidious office of Collector of Fines to the Star Chamber, ‘with a moiety of the fines he shall bring in.’ Porter was as full also of projects as Steele himself, and turned them, it would seem, to much better account. Thus we hear of ventures of his in ships called the Samaritan and the Roebuck, the latter of which proved so remunerative that the common sailors took £20 apiece as their share. He contracted to drain Somercoates Marsh in Lincolnshire, and complained to the Privy Council when his workmen were interfered with. In 1635 he joined with Lord Conway in petitioning the King for a grant of a kind of inspectorship of silks, for which dues were to be levied and £100 a year paid to the Treasury, the balance passing to the inspectors. Two years later Porter and his son George became deputies in the management of His Majesty’s Posts. Then we hear of him as an assistant in the Corporation of Saltmakers of Yarmouth, and a little later he is concerned in the erection of a light-house and harbour at Filey, near Flamborough Head. An invention for perfecting bar-iron without the use of Scotch coal was his next venture, and, having apparently obtained a patent for this, he prays the King for a grant of the forest of Exmoor in fee-farm with a tenure in socage and the liberty of disafforestation. Next year (1638) he was given the reversion of the Surveyorship of Petty Customs in the Port of London (Chaucer’s old post), and a little later on, with the Marquis of Hamilton, obtained leave from the King to examine all accounts made to his Majesty, and when they found any accountants to have deceived the King, to make what advantage they could, either by compounding with delinquents of that kind or by prosecuting them, the King to have one half the profit, and Porter and the Marquis the other. Many accountants, we are told, came in and offered very considerable compositions, so much more grist to Porter’s ever busy mill. These grants and petitions, it must be confessed, shed but a sorry light on the way affairs were managed during the eleven years of Charles’s personal government, but Porter knew how to make himself a favourite with the King by purchasing him works of art, conducting negotiations with Rubens and other painters, and many similar services. The State Papers which give us all these details of his business life tell us also some interesting scraps as to his taste in dress and at the table. He orders wine from abroad, and apparently uses his influence to get it in duty free, while a friend gratefully informs him that he has tried the largest soles he ever saw, fried them and pickled them according to Endymion’s directions, and found them excellent. A husband who knows much about cookery does not always contribute to the easy digestion of family meals. If Endymion interfered much in this or other respects, he may probably have repented of it, for his wife, Olive, was plainly a little hot-tempered. While Endymion was absent in Spain the letters of husband and wife are full of pretty quarrels and reconciliations. ‘Her will,’ he writes once, ‘must be done, or else there will be but little quiet’; and again,—‘I wish no more wrangling till we meet, absence being punishment enough. I beg you not to beat George (their eldest son) so much, unless he be very like me. I will never beat Charles for being like you.’ But Mrs. Porter could be submissive as well as provoking. Her brother tells her that Endymion is very angry, and she writes that—‘She did not think he could have been so cruel to have stayed so long away, and not to forgive that which he knows was spoken in passion. She knows not how to beg his pardon, because she has broken word with him before, but she hopes his good nature will forgive her, and that he will come home.’ Some day the temptation to piece together these married love-letters, with a sketch of what can be found out as to this interesting man, will become irresistible.22 Here I must hasten to justify Porter’s appearance on the present occasion. Five of Herrick’s poems are addressed to him, all in the vein of a poet to a patron with whom he was on familiar terms. One I take to be an answer to a letter of condolence on the death of one of Herrick’s own brothers, though it is usually maintained that the death alluded to is that of a brother of Porter himself. The others are all sportive; a letter in praise of a country life, a dialogue in which Herrick and Porter sing in turns the charms of country and court, and two encomiums on Porter’s liberality.
‘Let there be patrons, patrons like to thee,
Brave Porter! poets ne’er will wanting be;
Fabius and Cotta, Lentulus all live
In thee, thou man of men! who here dost give
Not only subject-matter for our wit
But likewise oil of maintenance for it.’
And again this quatrain, which calls up an amusing picture:
‘When to thy porch I come and ravish’d see
The state of poets there attending thee,
Those bards and I all in a chorus sing
We are thy prophets, Porter, thou our King.’
As these verses remind us, Porter was a patron of many other poets besides Herrick, and by them also was duly besung. He was a patron, too (the trait is too delightful to be omitted), of the redoubtable Captain Dover, and in his capacity of Groom of the Bedchamber, gave that worthy a suit of the King’s clothes to lend more grace to the celebration of the Cotswold Games. But here, alas, we must bid farewell to him. There are yet others of Herrick’s friends of whom we would fain write, notably a group of charming ladies: Mistress Bridget Lowman, to whom he wrote his ‘Meadow Verse’; Mrs. Dorothy Kennedy, from whom he parted with so much sorrow; the ‘most comely and proper Mistress Elizabeth Finch’; ‘Mrs. Catherine Bradshaw, the lovely, that crowned him with laurels’; and last, but certainly not least, that ‘Pearl of Putney, the mistress of all singular manners, Mistress Portman.’ But these, alas, are as mysterious to us as Julia and Dianeme themselves. The gossip that has here been set down has been gleaned, painfully enough, from old records and registers, and even these seemingly inexhaustible treasures will not always yield the information we desire.