Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks on the
highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS
and FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--
supply models, generally admirable in point of art, though of
very unequal merit in their execution and contents, of the
principal forms under which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES.
The graceful love-song, the celebration of feasts and wit, the
encomia of friends, the epigram as then understood, are all here
represented: even Herrick's vein in natural description is
prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir Robert Wroth, of
1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE NUMBERS,
for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that, as
a rule, Herrick is least successful.

Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most
noteworthy of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that
Herrick was no careless singer, but a true artist, working with
conscious knowledge of his art, we might have inferred the fact
from the choice of Jonson as his model. That great poet, as
Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment to order and govern
fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions being slow
and upon deliberation.' No writer could be better fitted for the
guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in
the old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose
invention, more fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at
once to fill up the moulds of form provided. He does this with a
lively facility, contrasting much with the evidence of labour in
his master's work. Slowness and deliberation are the last
qualities suggested by Herrick. Yet it may be doubted whether