Manuscripts Commission (1870), Mr H. T. Riley published certain documents preserved at Trinity Hall, included among which are entries in the Steward's Book of debts owing to the college by "Robert Herricke." The entries are for the years 1623 and 1630, and the sums owed are £3, 17s. 7d. for the former year, and £10, 16s. 9d. for the latter. Dr Grosart attempted to father these debts upon another Robert Herrick, the poet's cousin, and second son of Sir William Herrick. But there is nothing to show that this youth, who passed through Christ Church, Oxford, and Lincoln's Inn, was ever a member of Trinity Hall, or, indeed, of the University of Cambridge. The probability is, therefore, that Mr Riley was right in his identification, and what we know of the poet's impecuniosity at the University supports this view. CHAPTER III 66 SEALED OF THE TRIBE OF BEN T HE twelve years which elapse between Herrick's graduation at Cambridge in 1617, and his induction as vicar of Dean Prior in 1629, form one of the most obscure periods in his long life. This obscurity enjoins wary walking on the part of a biographer. At no other point in the story is the temptation to lay undue weight upon a slender thread of evidence so great. In attempting to unravel the tangled thread of these all-important years, almost our only clue is that afforded by the poet himself, and, as a single instance will show, Herrick plays fast and loose with the would-be chroniclers of his life. Because he writes an epitaph on a person-to wit, Prudence Baldwin, the faithful housekeeper of Dean Prior days and lays her in her "little urn," it must not for a moment be assumed that she is dead; the parish register at Dean Prior records that she lived at least thirty years after her epitaph was written, saw her octogenarian master put into his little urn, and his pulpit occupied by his successor. The reader, therefore, in following the story of the poet's life during these obscure years, must be prepared to find, instead of the record of established facts, a long series of more or less plausible suppositions. He will frequently encounter the words "probable" and "not impossible," and must rest content with these until firmer ground is reached. When Herrick left the University in 1617, it is natural to suppose that he made his way back to London. His Cambridge letters tell of visits paid to the capital in undergraduate days, and it was there that most of his friends and relations were settled. It is uncertain whether his mother was still living at Hampton. Some time before 1629, the year of her death, she had left that home, and had gone to reside with her married daughter at Brantham in Suffolk.' His brother Nicholas, however, was residing in London with his wife and family, and several of Herrick's poems point to a close friendship between the brothers. Sir William Herrick, too, probably passed a certain portion of the year at his business-house in Wood Street, but there is nothing to indicate that his nephew spent much time in his society. With the poet's departure from Cambridge, Sir William Herrick disappears from our view. He lived at Beaumanor until 1653, but we note, without surprise, that he finds no place in the poet's "white temple of my heroes," 1 Metcalfe, Visitation of Suffolk in 1612. |