It would be placing too touching a faith in under-graduate nature to attach much importance to the fact that the payments which Herrick requests were mostly to be made through booksellers, and that (save once when he confesses to having 'run somewhat deep into my tailor's debt') the need of books or the advancement of his studies are the pretexts mostly given for his requests for speedy payment. But there is no reason to imagine that Herrick's university career was an idle one. His poems show considerable traces of a knowledge and love of the classics. He translates from Virgil that charming passage which describes the meeting of Æneas with Venus clad as a simple huntress, is full of Horatian reminiscences, borrows a few couplets from Ovid, adapts quite a number of epigrams from Martial, makes so much use of his Catullus that we may guess he knew a fair number of his odes by heart, quotes Cicero, turns a tag or two from Sallust and Tacitus, and had a very extensive acquaintance with Seneca. In Greek he takes a couplet from Hesiod as a motto for his 'Noble Numbers,' alludes to Homer, though his reference to Helen at the Scaean Gate is perhaps rather from the 'Love Letters' of Aristaenetus than the Iliad, translates some twenty lines of Theocritus into the pretty poem entitled 'The Cruel Maid,' knew something of the Planudean Anthology, and knew, loved, translated, and mitated the pseudo-Anacreon.
A fuller account of Herrick's indebtedness to Greek and Latin authors will be found in another paper. This brief survey of his classical studies may suffice to prove that he was no idler, and when he left the university and returned to town he must have been well able to hold his own with the best wits of the day. The well-known poem on 'His Age,' 'dedicated to his peculiar friend, Mr. John Weekes under the name of Posthumus,' contains in the printed version some vague reminiscences of their sportive days. In the Egerton MS. 2725 at the British Museum one verse of this poem mentions some of their old play-fellows:
'Then the next health to friends of mine In oysters and Burgundian wine, Hind, Goderiske, Smith, And Nansagge,--'
acquaintances of the years ere yet Herrick had donned his parson's gown, and whose amatory powers he compares to those of Jove himself.