The
integrity of some of his royalistic poems is doubtful; but he was not
given the benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament, which ejected the
panegyrist of young Prince Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior,
and installed in his place the venerable John Syms, a gentleman with
pronounced Cromwellian views.
Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers at the Puritans, discarded
his clerical habiliments, and hastened to London to pick up such as were
left of the gay-colored threads of his old experience there. Once more
he would drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he would breathe the
air breathed by such poets and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden,
and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I' the mouth
too." In the gladness of getting back "from the dull confines of the
drooping west," he writes a glowing apostrophe to London--that "stony
stepmother to poets." He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud
to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers,
Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and
fell into great misery; but Dr.
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