The mention of Herrick's 'Temple' or 'Book' of his heroes has led us to gossip first of the less interesting half of his life which followed on his acceptance of a country living. The nine or ten years which passed between his leaving Cambridge and his retirement to Devonshire were probably the most poetically productive in all his career, and, from the glimpses which his poems give us, were certainly the gayest and most amusing.
He had gone to the University unusually late in life, in 1613 when he was already in his twenty-first year, that is to say, five or six years senior to the average freshman of those days. After his father's suicide (for the fall from a window following immediately on making his will can hardly have been accidental, and was not so regarded at the time) the care of the poet and his brothers had devolved on their uncles Robert and William, and the latter, who was jeweller, goldsmith, and banker to James I., shortly after receiving the honour of knighthood from the King, on September 25, 1607, accepted his nephew as an apprentice for ten years. Herrick's appreciation of material beauty was so keen that the absence from his poems (so far as my memory serves me) of any striking allusions to goldsmith's work may perhaps be taken as evidence that during his apprenticeship with his uncle he did not make any great progress in the craft. At all events he persuaded Sir William to excuse him the last four years of his time, and betook himself to Cambridge, the poets' University.
Fourteen letters which he wrote to his uncle from his college still survive, all written in a high-flown rhetorical style, sometimes lapsing into blank verse, and with one unvarying theme,--the need of a prompt remittance. His allowance was £40 a year (some £200 present value), probably paid out of the remnant of the £600 odd which came to him from his father's estate. This of itself was no bad 'stipend,' to use the poet's word, and from the tone of the letters we may guess that it was also supplemented by occasional gifts from his uncle and aunt. But it was apparently not paid regularly; Herrick was frequently in pecuniary straits, and about 1616 he migrated from St. John's to Trinity Hall in order to curtail his expenses, taking his bachelor's degree from the latter college in 1617.