Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Hesperides: Or, Works Both Human and Divine
Robert Herrick - whose name was written also Hearicke, Heyricke, Eyrick, and Erick - belonged to a Leicestershire family, out of which came in after years the Abigail Erick, who was mother to Jonathan Swift. The poet's father, Nicholas Herrick, was a goldsmith in Cheapside, who in 1582 married a Julian Stone and had seven children, of whom Robert, the youngest, was baptized on the 24th of August, 1591.
In November, 1592, Nicholas Herrick, being sick in body, made his will, and within a day afterwards fell or threw himself from a window of his house in Cheapside and was killed. Dr. Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, father of John Fletcher the poet, claimed, as High Almoner, the goods left by the dead man. He claimed them as goods and chattels of a suicide, but accepted upon arbitration an award of 220. In the following year a posthumous child was born to Mrs. Herrick. He was named William, after the uncle who acted as guardian to the children. The father's possessions realized for the family about 5,000
Robert Herrick had been named after the eldest of his uncles, an ironmonger, who was three times Mayor of Leicester, lived to keep his golden wedding-day, and died when his nephew and godson was twenty-seven years old. The poet had rich relatives, and many of them. His grandmother, when he was twenty years old, died at the age of ninety-seven, and it is said on her tomb that "she did see, before her departure, of her children and her children's children, to the number of 142." Herrick had on his mother's side an Aunt Anne, married to Sir Stephen Soame, who was Lord Mayor of London in 1598. This brings the name of Soame into his poems.
After an education of which nothing is known but that it laid foundations for a keen enjoyment of the Latin lyric poets, Robert Herrick was apprenticed, at the age of sixteen, to his uncle William, who obtained knighthood, and, like the poet's father, was a goldsmith. He lived in Wood Street, Cheapside, and had a manor - Beau Manor Park - in Leicestershire. Before he was out of his time as apprentice, Robert Herrick had given up the pursuit of trade and was studying as a Fellow Commoner at St. John's College, Cambridge. But it was from Trinity Hall that he graduated as B.A. in the year of Shakespeare's death, and as M.A. in 1620, when his age was twenty-nine.
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