No More Learning

16.

"Then _will I_ cause my hopeful Lad
(If a wild Apple can be had)
To crown the Hearth
(Lar thus conspiring with our mirth);
_Next_ to infuse
Our _better beer_ into the cruse:
Which, neatly spiced, we'll first carouse
Unto the _Vesta_ of the house.


17.

"Then the next health to friends of mine
_In oysters, and_ Burgundian wine,
_Hind, Goderiske, Smith,
And Nansagge_, sons of _clune[M] and_ pith,
Such _who know_ well
_To board_ the magic _bowl_, and _spill
All mighty blood, and can do more
Than Jove and Chaos them before_. "

[M] Clune = "clunis," a haunch.

This John Wickes or Weekes is spoken of by Anthony a Wood as a "jocular
person" and a popular preacher. He enters Wood's _Fasti_ by right of his
co-optation as a D. D. in 1643, while the court was at Oxford; his
education had been at Cambridge. He was a prebendary of Bristol and Dean
of St. Burian in Cornwall, and suffered some persecution as a royalist.
Herrick later on, when himself shedless and cottageless, addresses
another poem to him as his "peculiar friend,"

To whose glad threshold and free door
I may, a poet, come, though poor.

A friend suggests that Hind may have been John Hind, an Anacreontic poet
and friend of Greene, and has found references to a Thomas Goodricke of
St. John's Coll. , Camb.
, author of two poems on the accession of James
I. , and a Martin Nansogge, B. A. of Trinity Hall, 1614, afterwards vicar
of Cornwood, Devon. Smith is certainly James Smith, who, with Sir John
Mennis, edited the _Musarum Deliciae_, in which the first poem is
addressed "to Parson Weekes: an invitation to London," and contains a
reference to--

"That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein".

The early part of this poem contains, along with the name Posthumus,
many Horatian reminiscences: cp. especially II. _Od. _ xiv. 1-8, and IV.
_Od. _ vii. 14. It may be noted that in the imitation of the latter
passage in stanza iv. the MS. copy at the Museum corrects the
misplacement of the epithet, reading:--

"But we must on and thither tend
Where Tullus and rich Ancus blend," etc.