In his portraiture of the _Good Parson_, he paints himself.

He magnifies the office, and he fulfilled all the requirements he has laid down.
Robert Herrick, 1591-1674: like Herbert, Herrick was a clergyman, but, unlike Herbert, he was not a holy man.

He wrote Anacreontic poems, full of wine and love, and appears to us like a reveller masking in a surplice.
Being a cavalier in sentiment, he was ejected from his vicarage in 1648, and went to London, where he assumed the lay habit.

In 1647 he published _Hesperides_, a collection of small poems of great lyric beauty, Anacreontic, pastoral, and amatory, but containing much that is coarse and indelicate.

In 1648 he in part atoned for these by publishing his _Noble Numbers_, a collection of pious pieces, in the beginning of which he asks God's forgiveness for his "unbaptized rhymes," "writ in my wild, unhallowed times." The best comment upon his works may be found in the words of a reviewer: "Herrick trifled in this way solely in compliment to the age; whenever he wrote to please himself, he wrote from the heart to the heart." His _Litanie_ is a noble and beautiful penitential petition.
Sir John Suckling, 1609-1641: a writer of love songs.