with those of his fellow-poets for a hun- | power, though twisting it too often into dred years before, very few are the traces contortion and excess, appears to have which he gives of imitation, or even of been little known as a lyrist then,—as, study. During the long interval between indeed, his great merits have never reached Herrick's entrance on his Cambridge and anything like due popular recognition. his clerical careers (an interval all but Yet Marvell's natural description is nearer wholly obscure to us), it is natural to sup- Herrick's in felicity and insight than any pose that he read, at any rate, his Eliza- of the poets named above. Nor, again, do bethan predecessors: yet (beyond those we trace anything of Herbert or Vaughan general similarities already noticed) the in Herrick's "Noble Numbers," which, editor can find no positive proof of famil- though unfairly judged if held insincere, iarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, are obviously far distant from the intense Greene, Breton, Drayton, or other pretty conviction, the depth and inner fervor of pastoralists of the "Helicon " - his gen- his high-toned contemporaries. eral and radical unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of Spenser, the pensive beauty of " Parthenophil," of "Diella," of "Fidessa," of the "Hecatompathia" and the "Tears of Fancy." It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only English influences palpably operative on this singularly original writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him, yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the "Hesperides." In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in "The Faithful Shepherdess" are faintly traceable; from his songs, “Hear what love can do," and "The lusty Spring," more distinctly. But to Ben Jonson, whom 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" When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her, of 1641, (he died in 1637), - supply modLove may return, but lovers never ! Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or Waller. Herrick has his concetti also; but they are in him generally true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks of an aged fair one Love in her sunny eyes does basking play, or take Lovelace, "To Lucasta," Waller, manence. els, 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, in proof that Herrick was no careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of his art, we Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave might have inferred the fact from the also no mark on our poet. The elaborate choice of Jonson as his model. That thought, the metrical harshness of the first, great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, could find no counterpart in Herrick; had "judgment to order and govern fancy, whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative | rather than excess of fancy: his produc Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air tions being slow and upon deliberation." | tone which with singular felicity he has No writer could be better fitted for the often taken. These are common to many guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; writers with him, nor will he who canto whom the curb, in the old phrase, was not learn more from the great ancient more needful than the spur, and whose world ever rank among poets of high invention, more fertile and varied than order, or enter the innermost sanctuary of Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up the art. But the power to describe men and moulds of form provided. He does this things as the poets sees them with simwith a lively facility, contrasting much ple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint with the evidence of labor in his master's scenes and imaginations as perfect organic work. Slowness and deliberation are the wholes; carrying with it the gift to last qualities suggested by Herrick. Yet clothe each picture, as if by unerring init may be doubted whether the volatile stinct, in fit metrical form, giving to each ease, the effortless grace, the wild, birdlike its own music; beginning without affectafluency with which he tion, and rounding off without effort; the power, in a word, to leave simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingerare not, in truth, the results of exquisite ing on our minds, these gifts are at once art working in co-operation with the gifts the true bequest of classicalism, and the of nature. The various readings which reason why (until modern effort equals our few remaining manuscripts or printed them) the study of that Hellenic and Latin versions have supplied to Mr. Grosart's poetry in which these gifts are eminent "Introduction," attest the minute and cu- above all other literatures yet created, rious care with which Herrick polished must be essential. And it is success in and strengthened his own work: his airy precisely these excellences which is here facility, his seemingly spontaneous melo- claimed for Herrick. He is classical in dies, as with Shelley- his counterpart in the great and eternal sense of the phrase : pure lyrical art within this century and much more so, probably. than he was earned by conscious labor; perfect free-himself aware of. No poet in fact is so dom was begotten of perfect art; nor, far from dwelling in a past or foreign indeed, have excellence and permanence world; it is the England, if not of 1648, any other parent. at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his bucolics show no were With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely twined that trace of Sicily; his Anthea and Julia wear which ranks him in the school of that no "buckles of the purest gold," nor have master of elegant pettiness who has anything about them foreign to Middlesex usurped and abused the name Anacreon; or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no as a mere light-hearted writer of pastorals, far horizons; like Burns and Crabbe fifty a gay and frivolous Renaissance amourist. years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and He has indeed those elements: but with neglected pastoralist of fair Dorset, perthem is joined the seriousness of an age fect within his narrower range as Herrick) which knew that the light mask of classi- to-day it is his own native land only which calism and bucolic allegory could be worn he sees and paints: even the fairy world only as an ornament, and that life held in which, at whatever inevitable interval, much deeper and further-reaching issues then were visible to the narrow horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness. He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said: he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity. Within that greater Ariel and their fellows move, aiding or circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and injuring mankind, and reflecting human life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here, where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from "Midsummer-Night's Dream" or Tempest." If we are moved by the wider range of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with it a healthful 66 reality absent from the vapid and artificial "cosmopolitanism" that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has not the exotic blooms and strange odors which poets who derive from literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of English meadows; with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and inspiration which come from touch of man's native soil. What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his predecessors and contem poraries. If we now tentatively inquire what place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no single lyric to show equal in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us. Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's "Wishes;" Sir J. Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase; take Bishop King's "Surrender:". My once dear love! Hapless, that I no more, Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store ... That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent, Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent: Rose with delight to us, and with them set, That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or scheme of art) is wanting to the "Hesperides" and "Noble Numbers:" nor does Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord, that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and splendor, - by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely. But if we put aside these "greater gods" of song, with Sidney, in the editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both over nature and over art, clearly assigns to him the first place as lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all who flourished during the interval between Henry V. and a hundred years since. Single pieces of equal or higher quality we have, indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master singers who did not confine themselves to the lyric, but from many poets- some the unknown contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller, Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work, not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick, as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous, attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists, within the period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within the sphere prescribed to himself; such closeness to nature, whether in description or in feeling; such easy fitness in language: melody so unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has more lines, in his own phrase, "born of the royal blood:" the Inflata rore non Achaico verba are rarer with him: although superficially Dislodged from their haunts. We must in mannered, nature is so much nearer to tears him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is take eight lines by some old unknown described by the younger Pliny in words Northern singer : When I think on the happy days And now what lands between us lie, LIVING AGE. 907 very appropriate to Herrick: who in fact, if Greek in respect of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the "frankness of nature and vivid sense of life" which criticism assigns as marks of the great Roman poets. "Facit versus, quales Catullus aut Calvus. Quantum illis leporis, dulcedinis, amaritudinis amoris! Inserit sane, sed data opera, mollibus lenibusque duriusculos quosdam et hoc, quasi Catullus aut Calvus." Many pieces have been refused admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense, is unique. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which, so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere, making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other, more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at the same time new and richer lyrical forms, harmonies more intricate and sevenfold, have been created by them, as in Hellas during her golden age of song, to embody ideas and emotions unknown or unexpressed under Tudors and Stuarts. To this latter superiority Herrick would doubtless, have bowed, as he bowed before Ben Jonson's genius. "Rural ditties," and "oaten Aute" cannot bear the competition of the THERE is no profession in which such full modern orchestra. Yet this author striking contrasts of character and career need not fear! That exquisite and lofty are presented as in that of the actor. pleasure which it is the first and the last Here, indeed, extremes meet; vice and aim of all true art to give, must, by its virtue, the highest rectitude and the most own nature, be lasting also. As the eye- pronounced rascality may stand shoulder sight fluctuates, and gives the advantage to shoulder: at one end we have the gento different colors in turn, so to the vary-tleman in the best sense of the word; at ing moods of the mind the same beauty the other the vagabond in the worst, and does not always seem equally beautiful. with every shade of each to form a conThus from the "purple light" of our later tinuity. Both in the abstract and the poetry there are hours in which we may practical, the actor's is a high and noble look to the daffodil and rose tints of Her- calling. His sermons are more eloquent rick's old Arcadia, for refreshment and and more impressive than those of the delight. And the pleasure which he gives pulpit, since they appeal to the most senis as eminently wholesome as pleasurable.sitive qualities of the human heart—its F. T. PALGRAVE. From Temple Bar. CHARLES YOUNG. sympathies. He wields an enormous power for good or evil. Say that his influence is transitory, that it does not endure beyond the night, in that he is scarcely inferior to the greater preacher who exhorts each Sunday his congregation to live in peace and love with all mankind, to banish malice, greed, and uncharitableness from their hearts, and follow in the steps of a divine guide. His audience go forth next day to hate, to plunder, to raven for gold, and to oppress their fellowman, with no echo of his noble teachings lingering in their souls. Yet it would be presumption in us to say that such lessons are wholly fruitless. For who knows what latent seed may have escaped the scattering? So it is with the stage: the man or woman who at night applauds a generous sentiment, or weeps over the imaginary wrongs of a fictitious hero or heroine, may the next day commit the very acts which excited their tears and indignation; but even to have done homage to virtue in the abstract tends to preserve their souls from becoming wholly indurated, and none can tell, not even the person wrought upon, whether at some time those chastening memories may not have inclined them to some gentleness inexplicable even to themselves. Our experiences form a strange, inextricably woven web, yet every thread might be traced back to some forgotten impulse. There is no waking hour of our lives but some new thought, good or bad, is cast upon it; like seeds, perhaps, upon a stony soil, thousands perish where one germinates, but that one, even after long years have passed, and with them the memory of the hand that sowed, grows into a strong and healthy plant. years of probation in comfortable provincial engagements, he took that position upon the London stage which he relinquished only by his own free will, and retired into private life a man honored by all who knew him. Such contrasts set us thinking. Had those two children changed places in their infancy, would their lives have still been the same, or might they have changed places? Of course in such speculations we must make allowance for idiosyncrasies. There Charles Mayne Young was born in Fenchurch Street in 1777. His father, who was a surgeon, appears to have been anything rather than an estimable character. While yet a child, Charles went on a visit to his aunt and uncle, Dr. Müller, the court physician, at Copenhagen. the king and queen and queen dowager became so fond of the boy that they would have kept him altogether. At parting they gave him a purse, which the queen had worked for him, filled with gold, a watch, and two portraits which had been taken of him- one of these was hung in the king's private cabinet. He commenced his education at Eton, but altered circumstances at home, through the dissipated habits of the head of the household, rendered his stay there brief, and he was removed to Merchant Taylors'. By-and-by their father's conduct rose to such a height of infamy, that the sons removed their mother from beneath the paternal roof, and Charles took her support upon himself. His first entrance into life was as a merchant's clerk. It does not appear how he first came to entertain the idea of taking to the stage; the only information to be In my last paper I attempted to trace gleaned upon the subject is that given in the career of a great, but most erring and the "Memoirs" of Mathews, who relates unhappy genius; in my present I have that he met him as an amateur in some taken that of an actor who in every re-theatricals held in a loft over a.stable in spect was his opposite. Yet man is much as his opportunities make him, and while Kean was reared miserably, cursed in a bad mother, a proud soul exposed to every humiliation of destitution, Young was brought up in comfort, almost affluence, and received the training and education of a gentleman. Few if any of the actor's vicissitudes and trials fell to his lot; whether by force of ability or good fortune, probably a little of both, he escaped that dreary progression, those toils and hardships, which have usually embittered and chequered the lives of the most fortunate actors. He mounted at once to the highest rung of the ladder, and after a few Short's Gardens, Drury Lane. Young soon grew tired of the dull drudgery of office work, and in 1798 we find him making his debut at Liverpool, under the name of Mr. Green, in Young Norval. His success appears to have been immediate and assured. The year after his début, we find him engaged for the principal business at Manchester. Thence he migrated to Edinburgh, and at once established himself in so high a position, both histrionically and socially, that in 1802 we hear of his being a guest at the table of Walter Scott, with whom he contracted an intimate friendship. It was in 1804 that he first met the |