who stand less in need than Herrick of commentaries of this
description,--in which too often we find little more than a dull
or florid prose version of what the author has given us admirably
in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions, Herrick is the
best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need therefore
here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near
his own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he
unveils in his own way, and so most durably and delightfully.

When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after
Chaucer's death, during the years of war and revolution,
reappeared, they brought with them foreign modes of art, ancient
and contemporary, in the forms of which they began to set to
music the new material which the age supplied. At the very
outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which has
characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying
between the last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his
great daughter. But with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's
accession, poetry was once more distinctly followed, not only as
a means of conveying thought, but as a Fine Art. And hence
something constrained and artificial blends with the freshness of
the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying elements it
necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier poets,
Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a
double external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome
(known either in their own tongues or by translation), and that