There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech. At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse: “For these my unbaptizèd rhymes Writ in my wild unhallowed times, For every sentence, clause, and word That’s not inlaid with thee, O Lord; Forgive me, God, and blot each line Out of my book, that is not thine!” _Revolutionary Times._ I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories. The writers of this particular period--some of whom I have named--fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ardors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.[43] The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit; humor is saddled with school-craftiness; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Poetry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration.