HERBERT, George, to whose name the epithet of "Holy" is always attached, as "judicious" to that of Hooker, and "moral" to that of Gower, was a younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and was born at the castle of Montgomery, in Wales, April 3, 1593. After leaving Westminster, where his public education began, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge. In course of time he became a fellow of his college, and in 1619 public orator to the University. Donne and Wotton were his intimate friends; and Lord Bacon is said to have attached so much importance to his literary judgment, that he never published anything which had not first been approved by him. With these high connections he looked forward to court preferment, and indeed obtained from King James a sinecure of £120 a year, that had once been held by Sir Philip Sidney. "With this," says his biographer, Izaak Walton, "and his annuity, and the advantages of his college and of his oratorship, he enjoyed his genteel humour for clothes and court-like company, and seldom looked towards Cambridge unless the king were there, but then he never failed." But Herbert's hopes were dashed by the death of the king, and to maintain himself he entered the church. In 1626 he was made first prebend of Leighton Bromswold, or Layton Ecclesia, and four years later rector of Bemerton, in Wiltshire, where he spent the remainder of his life. Before entering on the duties of his parish, he married, and with his wife made a solemn renunciation of the frivolities of the gay world for which, even after taking orders, he seems to have always retained a hankering. Once fairly installed, he became the model of a country clergyman, and laboured with a truly apostolical zeal and self-devotion. His prose work, the Country Parson, is a faithful picture of what he regarded as his ministerial duties, and the best way of performing them. But his constitution soon broke down under the combined influences of over-work and a quotidian ague, which afflicted him during the later years of his life. He died in 1632, before he had reached his fortieth year.
Herbert's principal work is entitled The Temple; Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, which was not pub-
lished till after his death. In the course of a few years after his death, according to Walton, it was six or seven times reprinted; and by the time that the old angler came to write Herbert's Life, in the reign of Charles II., twenty thousand copies of it had been sold. It is generally ranked in that school of poetry known as the "Metaphysical," of which Herbert's contemporaries, Donne and Quarles, were in that age the most noted examples. The odes, hymns, and meditations of which it is composed, though often dashed by the quaint conceits, far-fetched analogies, and ridiculous imagery of that school, yet breathe a spirit of melting pathos, and saintly devotion, set off by so many gems of the finest fancy, that their author still holds his ground among the best religious poets of England. A stanza or two from the ode on "Virtue," will afford an illustration of Herbert's best manner:—
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky,
The dews shall weep thy fall to-night;
For thou must die.
"Sweet rose! whose hue, angry and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye;
Thy root is ever in its grave,
For thou must die."
Herbert has been likened to Keble, the author of the Christian Year. The comparison is a just one. Both breathe a common spirit of saintly piety, and both love to present the belief and offices of their church in their most alluring and amiable aspect. The quality of the genius displayed in both is very similar, but in the matter of taste the older poet compares but ill with his modern anti-type. Herbert's chief prose work bears the title of The Priest to the Temple. Its purport is quite similar to that of the Country Parson.
There have been many editions of Herbert's poetical works. One of the most splendid is that of Nisbet, London, 1856.