Herrick's name has been so persistently connected with _Poor Robert's Almanack_ that a few words must be said on the subject. There is, we are told, a Devonshire tradition ascribing the _Almanack_ to him, and this is accepted by Nichols in his _Leicestershire_, and "accredited" by Dr. Grosart. The tradition apparently rests on no better basis than Herrick's Christian name, and of the poems in the issues of the _Almanack_ which I have seen, it may be said, that, while the worst of them, save for some lack of neatness of turn, might conceivably have been by Herrick--on the principle that if Herrick could write some of his epigrams, he could write anything--the more ambitious poems it is quite impossible to attribute to the author of the _Hesperides_. But apart from opinion, the negative evidence is overwhelming. Of the three earliest issues in the British Museum, 1664, 1667 and 1669 (all in the annual collections of Almanacs, issued by the Stationers' Company, and all, it may be noted, bound for Charles II.), I transcribe the title-page of the first. "Poor Robin. 1664. An Almanack After a New Fashion wherein the Reader may see (if he be not blinde) many remarkable things worthy of Observation. Containing a two-fold Kalendar, viz. the Iulian or English, and the Roundheads or Fanaticks: with their several Saints daies and Observations, upon every month. Written by Poor Robin, Knight of the burnt Island and a well-willer to the Mathematicks. Calculated for the Meridian of Saffron Walden, where the Pole is elevated 52 degrees and 6 minutes above the Horizon. London: Printed for the Company of Stationers."