The
earliest direct reference to this plan is in his address to John Selden,
the antiquary (365), in which he writes:--
"A city here of heroes I have made
Upon the rock whose firm
foundation
laid
Shall never shrink; where, making thine abode,
Live thou a Selden, that's a demi-god".
Robert Herrick
_ iv.: Quisquis
vitam suam contempsit tuae dominus est. Quoted by Montaigne, I. xxiii.
488. _Shame is a bad attendant to a state._ From Seneca, _Hippol._ 431:
Malus est minister regii imperii pudor.
_He rents his crown that fears the people's hate._ Also from Seneca,
_Oedipus_, 701: Odia qui nimium timet regnare nescit.
496. _To his honoured kinsman, Sir Richard Stone_, son of John Stone,
sergeant-at-law, the brother of Julian Stone, Herrick's mother. He died
in 1660.
_To this white temple of my heroes._ Ben Jonson's admirers were proud to
call themselves "sealed of the tribe of Ben," and Herrick, a devout
Jonsonite, seems to have imitated the idea so far as to plan sometimes,
as here, a Temple, sometimes a Book (see _infra_, 510), sometimes a City
(365), a Plantation (392), a Calendar (545), a College (983), of his own
favourite friends, to whom his poetry was to give immortality.
The
earliest direct reference to this plan is in his address to John Selden,
the antiquary (365), in which he writes:--
"A city here of heroes I have made
Upon the rock whose firm
foundation
laid
Shall never shrink; where, making thine abode,
Live thou a Selden, that's a demi-god".
It is noteworthy that the poems which contain the clearest reference to
this Temple (or its variants) are mostly addressed to kinsfolk, _e.g._,
this to Sir Richard Stone, to Mrs. Penelope Wheeler, to Mr. Stephen
Soame, and to Susanna and Thomas Herrick. Other recipients of the honour
are Sir Edward Fish and Dr. Alabaster, Jack Crofts, Master J. Jincks,
etc.
497. _All flowers sent_, etc. See Virgil's--or the Virgilian--_Culex_,
ll. 397-410.
