Robert Herrick[41] was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London--learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, perhaps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “noble numbers” which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Devon. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names. Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow: “The soft, sweet moss shall be thy bed, With crawling woodbine overspread: By which the silver-shedding streams Shall gently melt thee into dreams. Thy clothing next, shall be a gown Made of the fleeces’ purest down. The tongues of kids shall be thy meat; Their milk thy drink; and thou shalt eat The paste of filberts for thy bread, With cream of cowslips butterèd: Thy feasting table shall be hills With daisies spread and daffodils; Where thou shalt sit, and Red-breast by, For meat, shall give thee melody.”