Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/197

Rh, his lavish equipment of one hundred horse for the abortive Scottish war, are quite in keeping with the tone of his sparkling love-songs. He reproduces some of Donne's more reckless defiances of the conventions in love with less intensity but greater ease and humour. In delightful gaiety no poem could surpass—

"Out upon it I have loved                       Three whole days together";

and in the incomparable Ballad upon a Wedding there is not only gaiety but exquisite description. The poet with whom he suggests comparison is his contemporary Vincent Voiture, neater perhaps and more pointed at his best, but with far less of feeling and imagination.

But of all the poets who may be classed somewhat loosely as court lyrists, the greatest in virtue both of vigour of fancy and perfection of technique is Robert Herrick (1591-1674), one of the "sons of Ben" at Cambridge and London for a few years, who wrote his best poems in what he considered banishment at Deanbourne in Devonshire, where he was rector from 1629 to his death, though ejected during the years of the Commonwealth. Herrick was not of the school of Herbert or Crashaw. His saints were "Saint Ben" and the classic poets to whom he dedicated an enthusiastic strain in the verse entitled "To Live Merrily and to Trust to Good Verses." These are the literary source of his inspiration. Guided by them he found another, when he went to Devonshire,