He has the
aspect of one meditating assault and battery.
To offset the picture there is much indirect testimony to the amiability
of the man, aside from the evidence furnished by his own writings.
He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the Bishop of Lincoln's
imprisonment--a poem full of deference and tenderness for a person
who had evidently injured the writer, probably by opposing him in some
affair of church preferment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "became much
beloved by the gentry in these parts for his florid and witty (wise)
discourses." It appears that he was fond of animals, and had a pet
spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away without a couplet attached
to him:
Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
For shape and service spaniell like to thee.
Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a sparrow, whose elegy he
also sings, comparing the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's
disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans. On the authority of
Dorothy King, the daughter of a woman who served Herrick's successor at
Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet kept a pig, which he had
taught to drink out of a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admirably
qualified to impart.
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