Nott, a physician of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted in full. It remained
for the taste of our own day to multiply editions of him.
In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it is now only needful that
some wiseacre should attribute the authorship of the poems to some man
who could not possibly have written a line of them. The opportunity
presents attractions that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a handful
of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap of his manuscript extant;
the men who drank and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple Tun
make no reference to him; (1) and in the wide parenthesis formed by his
birth and death we find as little tangible incident as is discoverable
in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-two years. Here is material
for profundity and ciphers!
(1) With the single exception of the writer of some verses
in the _Musarum Deliciae_ (1656) who mentions
That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein.
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