living in the heart of the best society, in daily attendance upon the king. He had but to open his lips to be appreciated and applauded, and his poetry was produced, not for the world, but for the inner circle of the best society of England. His occasional verses are few, and well chosen as to dedicatees to majesty, to the Lord Chief Justice of England, to peers and peeresses; of poets, to Donne, to Jonson, Sandys, and the contemporary laureate, Davenant; to some few courtly friends; to many fair ladies, whose anonymity is becomingly preserved from the prying scrutiny of the outside world in initials and pseudonymes. Herrick, on the other hand, banished from the society of the wits which he loved, forced into retirement for the sake of a livelihood, enjoyed the compensation of a closer association with nature. His poetry was written for his own pleasure and that of a few friends who loved the work for the man's sake. Herrick was nearly sixty before The Hesperides was printed, and the volume made no great stir, nor is likely to have done so even had it appeared in more propitious times. His occasional verse contains lines to royalty, addressed from afar, but exhibits no familiarity with 'great ones.' His dedicatees are the small country gentry, that sound, wholesome stock which maintained the honesty and purity of English blood when the court had become a veritable plague spot and threatened the life of the nation.

With such contrasted environments as these acting upon temperaments susceptible in each case, we must expect contrasted results even within the well-defined limits of this species of lyric. In Herrick we have the elasticity and freedom that come with the breath of open air, a greater openness and geniality of disposition. His range of subject, so charmingly set forth in The Argument to his Book, begins with "brooks and blossoms, birds and bowers," and ends with heaven. Between lie many things the seasons, coun

try mirth, "cleanly wantonness," "the court of Queen Mab and the Fairy King." Considering only Carew's most characteristic lyrics, we may say that his range is contained in a corner of this spacious garden of Herrick. In Carew the view of life is narrower, more conventional; there is greater repression, but more civility, more elegance and polish. Despite occasional touches of truth in the observation of nature, we find a use of natural objects for decorative effect and a frequent employment of metaphor which applies the work of man to illustrate nature.1 Carew knows nothing of " "country glee" or fairyland, and better appreciates the cold brilliancy of diamonds than the blush of "July-flowers," the odors of spicery than the "essences of jessamine." Yet, granting this limitation, which is the more apparent if we consider Herrick's charming folklore or "paganism of the country side," his prevailing eroticism draws him near to Carew; whilst the touches of a wider experience in his occasional poetry disclose unrealized possibilities in Carew.

In nothing is the difference between these poets so plainly set forth as in what may be called their temper. Herrick is genial, naïf, playful at times; there is a spontaneousness about him, a sincerity that disarms criticism. Take this characteristic little poem, To his Conscience :

Can I not sin, but thou wilt be

My private prothonotary?
Can I not woo thee to pass by
A short and sweet iniquity?
I'll cast a mist, a cloud upon
My delicate transgression,
So utter dark, as that no eye
Shall see the hugged impiety:

Gifts blind the wise, and bribes do please,

1 Cf. The Spring, p. 63 of this volume, vv. 2, 3. The Primrose, and Carew's To the New Year.

See also Herrick's

And wind all other witnesses;

And wilt not thou with gold be tied
To lay thy pen and ink aside?

That in the mirk and tongueless night,
Wanton I may, and thou not write ?
It will not be and therefore, now,
For times to come, I'll make this vow,
From aberrations to live free;

So I'll not fear the Judge and thee.1

There is no lack of clear vision here; yet who believes in the seriousness of this pretty repentance? This 'vow' is of the same nature as his vows to Apollo, Bacchus, or Venus:

Make her this day smile on me
And I'll roses give to thee.2

In a word, the engaging temper of a man not wholly impeccable, nor seeking to have you believe that he is, shines forth a man of kindly heart, much beloved by his parishioners, charitable, simple, unostentatious, loving mirth and playful gallantry, not a stranger to the cup or to full-blooded life, hating the unlovely, and writing horrid epigrams on what he detested, measured by his detestation; shrinking somewhat from deeper thoughts, from an omnipresent dread of death, the mortal antipathy of every true Hedonist.

The temper of Carew was greatly in contrast with this. Evidently a man of few friends, of much reserve, there was in him more inward fire than might have been supposed under his perfect control. Carew was a man altogether sophisticate, never to be carried away into portrayal of self; of pointed and polished wit, and a gentleman in the use of it; a master in the arch and wilfully perverse hyperbole of compliment; but neither satirist nor cynic, from the feeling

1 Noble Numbers, ed. Grosart, III, 147.

2 Hesperides, ibid. 52.

that satire and cynicism withdraw a man from that easy contact with his fellows in which good society consists, a contact the essence of which is a graceful waiving of the distinctions of rank in the midst of an ever-present sense of their existence.

If we consider what are the characteristics which mark the variety of poetry called vers de société, we shall find them to consist largely in the following: the recognition of man living in a highly organized state of society as a fitting theme for poetry, the making of the conventions of social life into a subject for art which may involve as faithful realism as the imitation of any other phase of nature. It is only the man who knows this phase of life from within who can truly depict it; not because it is superior to other life, but because it is broken up into a greater number of facets, each reflecting its own little picture. Defining vers de société, then, as an attempt to produce the effect demanded of poetry from the materials existing in the highly organized status of cultivated life, we may expect to find this species of poetry wherever such life exists, and in England it came to exist in its perfection in the reign of King James. The earlier age was too much engrossed with great ideas; it was too expansive, and hence too little intent on what was near. Vers de société demands self-control, at times daring, ease and elegance of manner, delicacy of touch, wit, an entire absence of pedantry, perfection of form and of finish. Carew has all this. He has even much of the French gaiété and esprit, while preserving with his English spirit a remarkable originality on an instrument of such limited scale.

Herrick, too, wrote verse of this class, but he wrote more and better on other themes. It is not strange, considering the environment of each of these poets and their differing success in reaching their contemporary public, that Herrick should have affected his successors far less than Carew.

Carew was in the direct line of development from the assimilative classicism of Ben Jonson to the restrictive classicism of Edmund Waller; Herrick was without the range of that course of development, territorially and artistically. He was really above it. And yet Herrick was not without his later kindred, less by direct influence than by the common bond that unites all true poets in the love of nature and of man. Andrew Marvell and Charles Cotton both breathe the fresh country air that Herrick so loved. But it is doubtful if either owes much directly to Herrick; it is certain that Cotton owes much to Carew.

The complex poetical relations of Waller must be deferred to a later consideration. It is sufficient to notice here that while he owes most to Carew in the thought and manner of his lyrics, as Pope long since pointed out,' Waller did not disdain to borrow an occasional thought from the less-known vicar of Dean Prior. In a late edition of Wit's Recreations, a miscellany made up of an indiscriminate garnering of fragments, some good, some very bad, from poets of past and contemporary repute, three poems on the rose appear side by side. Two of them are by Waller, one the famed Go, lovely Rose, the other, probably the original, is by Herrick.2 The idea of another of Waller's most highly praised lyrics, On a Girdle, will also be found paralleled in Herrick's Upon Julia's Ribband. Here is the same familiar thought as treated in the manner of three differing schools. rick says in simple affirmation :

Nay 't is the zonulet of love,

Wherein all pleasures of the world are wove.3

Her

1 Cf. a rough draft of a Discourse on the Rise and Progress of English

Poetry, Riverside ed., Pope, I, clv.

2 See p. 125 and the note thereon.

3 Ed. Hale, p. 20.