A charming village is Dean Prior, as indeed are all the villages on the outskirts of Dartmoor. No wonder that essayists on, and editors of, Herrick have traced his freshness and quaintness to the simplicity of a West Country parish, and that the perfume of flowers which pervades his pages almost _ad nauseam_ seems to his readers to be inspired by the soft and luxurious air of Devonshire. In a word, Herrick’s _Hesperides_ has seemed to be the work of a Devonshire man drawing his inspiration from Devonshire, as Barnes from Dorset or Burns from Ayrshire. I am bound, however, to say that I believe this to be true only with considerable limitations. Generally speaking, I hold that while the _Noble Numbers_ do undoubtedly belong to the Dean Prior period, the same cannot be said with equal certainty of the _Hesperides_, or at least of that part of the _Hesperides_ which has given Herrick his immortality. The book contains, no doubt, several pieces, perhaps some sixty in all, which are shewn by internal evidence to have been written later than 1628, but of these, few, if any, are of special merit. The real Apples of the Golden Garden are practically undated. Now we must remember that not only was Herrick thirty-eight when he went to Devonshire, an age at which many poets have produced their best work, but that he hated, or, to use his own oft-repeated expression, “loathed” Devonshire. This hatred is expressed in numerous passages. The following, written at the time of his ejection from the living, may serve as a specimen:— First let us dwell in widest seas, Next with severest savages, Last let us make our best abode Where human foot as yet ne’er trod. Search worlds of ice and rather there Live than in loathèd Devonshire. “No bird,” says Plato, “sings when it is cold or hungry or suffering any pain,” and it is a natural inference from passages like this of Herrick’s that his native genius suffered rather than gained from his sojourn at Dean Prior. But on this point he has left us his own testimony in two important passages. The first runs thus:— Before I went In banishment Into the loathèd West, I could rehearse A lyric verse, And speak it with the best. The second is— More discontents I never had Since I was born than here, Where I have been and still am sad, In this dull Devonshire. Yet justly too I must confess I ne’er invented such Ennobled numbers for the press As where I loathed so much.