There is also wanting: Baptisms, 30 Nov. 1557 to 29 Nov. 1559.

There are several interesting original notes on current events interspersed.

2. Mr. Wainwright has also calendared the whole of the existing ancient municipal records of the borough of Barnstaple, which are now deposited in the MS. room of the North Devon Athenæum. The earliest of these records is of the date A.D. 1311. The calendar runs to no less than 4881 articles, comprising, besides the very large number of documents of local interest, many of general historical value.

3. Among the records mentioned in the preceding paragraph is (No. 4147) a fragment of the original Register of the old Court of Probate of the Archdeacon of Barum, extending from 1573 to 1586 inclusive, which has been separately transcribed by Mr. Wainwright. It contains an account of upwards of two thousand wills, the parish of the testator in each case being given. (R. W. C.)

HERRICK IN DEVONSHIRE.

BY F. H. COLSON, M.A.

(Read at Plymouth, July, 1892.)

HERRICK has been defined as "a sort of clerical Horace," and the definition is at first sight fairly felicitous; for Herrick was undoubtedly a clergyman, and undoubtedly also he imbibed much of the spirit of Horace, as well as of Catullus, Martial, and Anacreon. Few moreover can have read their Horace without feeling that the life he would have chosen, had he lived in modern times, is the life of a country parson, and that Maecenas, if it had been possible, would have given him, instead of the Sabine farm, a snug vicarage with a few acres of glebe-coupled, it should be added, with a general leave to come for a month or two to town whenever the fancy took him.

Herrick's parish is an ideal one for a poet. The little village of Dean Prior is one of those typical English villages, with its church nestling among the trees, and the squire's house and park close at hand. Add to these the peculiar luxuriance of a Devonshire combe, and the great masses of Dartmoor rising in strange contrast in the back ground. No wonder that essayists 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.

How far is this really the case? In deciding this we must remember two facts. Firstly he was thirty-eight years old when he left London, and was appointed to Dean Prior.

Secondly he hated, or, to use his own oft-repeated expression, "loathed" Devonshire.

The significance of the first is obvious. Poets, especially poets of Herrick's type, do not begin to write at thirty-eight, and as the Hesperides contains about the whole of Herrick's secular poetry, much of it may be naturally held to belong to a date before the migration to Devonshire. Of the poems whose dates can be fixed, many do actually belong to the earlier period. But the real "Apples of the Hesperides," the songs by which we remember Herrick, are nearly al, if not all, undated, and nothing can be known of them save by internal probability.

Herrick's hatred of Devonshire is expressed with fierce insistance in passages which are too numerous to quote. But the following, written at the time of his ejection from his living, may serve as a specimen :

"First let us dwell in rudest 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 loathed 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 that Herrick's native genius suffered rather than gained from his sojourn in Dean Prior. But on this part he has left us his own testimony in two important passages.

The first runs thus:

The second is:

"Before I went

In banishment,

Into the loathed west;

I could rehearse,

A lyric verse,

And speak it with the best."

"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."

At first sight these two passages seem contradictory, but the contradiction vanishes when we remember that Herrick's. book of sacred poems is called "Noble Numbers." To these, and these only, as it seems to me, the "ennobled numbers

of passage number two refers, and the plain meaning of these lines is that Herrick, as vicar of Dean Prior, felt his old powers of song-making gone, and gave his attention mainly to sacred poetry.

To the same conclusion point some lines in the "Farewell to Poetry," written probably when he took orders.

"I my desires screw from thee, and direct

Them and my thoughts to that sublime respect
And conscience unto priesthood."

But he adds

"When my diviner muse,

Shall want a handmaid as she oft will use
Be ready then for me to wait upon her,

Though as a servant, yet a maid of honour."

Now it would be absurd to push all this to any cut and dried conclusion, and assert that whenever we find a light and bird-like lyric in the Hesperides, we are to set it down to Herrick's earlier days. But that his statement is generally true I see no reason to doubt, more especially as in all the thousand and odd lyrics which

Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May and June, and July flowers,"

there is, so far as I can see, little or no trace of Devonshire. The great poets, whom Herrick looked on as his masters, Catullus and Horace, understood the magic of a name, and were fond of grouping their prettiest thoughts, round the names of the particular spots which they knew. Any one who reads Catullus' lines on Sirmio, or the wealth of affection which Horace has lavished on the valley of the Digentia; anyone, we may add, who knows Burns, or Wordsworth, or Scott, will feel the significance of the fact that Herrick only once mentions by name any place in Devonshire. It is not that he dislikes localising, for he lingers affectionately enough over the names of

"Richmond, Kingston, and of Hampton Court."

And on the one occasion when a Devonshire scene is described by name, it is in the following lines on "Dean is a rude river in Devon, by which he sometimes dwelt."

"Dean Bourn farewell! I never look to see,

Dean or thy watry incivility."

The reader of Herrick will remember that he goes on to say that the "currish churlish" people of Dean are as rocky

as their river. Herrick could hardly be expected to admire Dartmoor itself. The maxim of Quintilian-species planis maritimis amænis, has held almost into our own century. But the glen of Dean Bourn is a different thing, and surely nothing but invincible prejudice can have made Herrick describe it in such "currish and churlish" terms.

Herrick is par excellence the poet of flowers and fruits. Cherries, cowslips, daffodils, and primroses are inseparably connected with his name. That the rich luxuriance of Dean Prior must have been a source of continual pleasure to him we cannot doubt: for even in "dull Devonshire" a primrose by the river's brim is a yellow primrose, and that in spite of Wordsworth is saying a good deal. Yet even in this department of nature, one misses local touches. Where are the high hedgerows, the ferns and the fox-gloves, and where are the apple orchards of Devon?

Herrick was very fond of observing village festivities and studying folk-lore, though his interest in these matters seems to me rather of an antiquarian than of a poetic nature. How far any Devonshire peculiarities may be traced in these poems I do not know. I have seen it stated on the one hand, that many of the charms and customs he mentions are still extant in his parish; on the other hand that his fairies have no kinship to our pixies. But whether this is so or not I cannot say. A small circumstance seems to me significant. In Herrick's description of barley-breaks, harvest homes, and Christmas festivities, there is much mention of beer but none of cider. Cider-making had its poetry for Keats.

"Or by a cider-press with patient look.

Thou watchest the last oosings hour by hour."

But in Herrick neither cider making nor cider drinking finds a place.

One of Herrick's parishioners stands out pleasantly in the pages of Hesperides, "my Prue," otherwise Prudence Baldwin, the house-keeper, who apparently followed him to London at his ejection, and returned with him in 1660, and was buried in the churchyard four years after the vicar. Other of the parishioners may be described in the epigrams; if so, no wonder they were churlish. A few names, not very many, of West-country gentry appear, but on the whole, there is as little of local life as of local scenery in the Hesperides.

The critics then seem to me perverse, who in spite of Herrick's assurances, declare that he only pretended to