Grosart disputes this, arguing, with
justness, that Herrick's family, which was wealthy and influential,
would not have allowed him to come to abject want. With his royalistic
tendencies he may not have breathed quite freely in the atmosphere of
the Commonwealth, and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot, but
among them was not poverty.
The poet was now engaged in preparing his works for the press, and a few
weeks following his return to London they were issued in a single volume
with the title "Hesperides; or, The Works both Humane and Divine of
Robert Herrick, Esq."
The time was not ready for him. A new era had dawned--the era of the
commonplace. The interval was come when Shakespeare himself was to lie
in a kind of twilight. Herrick was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had
strayed by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--a sylvan singing
creature alighting on an alien planet. "He was too natural," says Mr.
Palgrave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical; he had not the learned
polish, the political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn,
which were then and onward demanded from poetry.
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