I have now brought him to the parsonage of Bemerton, and to the thirty - sixth year of his age, and must stop here, and bespeak the reader to prepare for an almost incredible story, of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life; a life so full of charity, humility, and all Christian virtues, that it deserves the eloquence of St. Chrysostom to commend and declare it… [I] profess myself amazed when I consider how few of the clergy lived like him then, and how many live so unlike him now.

Isaak Walton, The Life Of Mr. George Herbert (1670)

If you think the Angel Gabriel in Jacobean clothing is an over-the-top description of our subject, look at this passage from an early twentieth century edition of Herbert’s poems:

Here, as the cattle wind homeward in the evening light, the benign, white-haired parson stands at his gate to greet the cowherd, and the village chimes call the labourers to evensong. For these contented spirits, happily removed from the stress and din of contending creeds and clashing dogmas, the message of the gospel tells of divine approval for work well done… And among these typical spirits, beacons of a quiet hope, no figure stands out more brightly or more memorably than that of George Herbert.¹

The reality of Herbert, his life and ministry, is, of course, a lot less bucolic, and because of that, a lot more interesting.

George Herbert was born on 3 April 1653 at Montgomery to Richard and Magdalene Herbert. His family were a collateral branch of the Earls of Pembroke; his paternal grandfather, Edward, was constable of Montgomery Castle, and his maternal grandfather, Richard Newport, was a descendent of Welsh royalty. He was part of a large family, the seventh of ten children. When he was less than four years old his father died, having been injured in a robber ambush some years before. His mother was two months pregnant with his youngest brother Thomas. The family moved to live with his maternal grandmother in Eyton-upon-Severn in Shropshire, but following his grandmother’s death in early 1599 the family were obliged to move again.

This time Magdalene took her family to Oxford, where George’s eldest brother, Edward (later first Baron of Cherbury) had already matriculated at University College. According to Herbert’s later, and not always reliable, biographer Isaak Walton, it was while living in Oxford that Magdalene Herbert became friends with the young courtier and diplomat, John Donne. Many years later Donne was to deliver the eulogy at Magdalene’s memorial service.

By 1601 the family had moved again, this time to a house in Charing Cross, then a rapidly developing suburb between the two cities of London and Westminster. We have an illuminating picture of life in the Herbert household. Magdalene began a ‘Kitchen Book’ in April 1601, which records household expenditure, living arrangements and even guests for dinner. The household was large and hospitable, perhaps too much so. Edward Herbert acerbically recorded many years later that

My mother together with myself and wife removed up to London where we took house, and kept a greater family than became either my mother’s widow’s estate or such young beginners as we were, especially since six brothers and three sisters were to be provided for.²

It seems clear that Magdalene was in her element. Her son grudging admitted that she brought her children up carefully, and dedicated them to learning. She led a life that would have been denied to her as the child-bearing wife of a provincial gentleman. The ‘Kitchen Book’ records that in their first year in Charing Cross John Bull and William Byrd of the Chapel Royal were guests at dinner. George was put to the study of Latin and rhetoric: the kitchen book records payments to tutors and booksellers. William Camden, the historian, was also a guest at dinner.

By 1604 George entered Westminster School as a day pupil. The headmaster at the time was Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster and afterwards Bishop of Chichester and Winchester. George excelled at his studies and was elected a scholar (residential pupil) in 1605. In May 1609 he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where there was a tradition of Westminster boys. When he graduated in 1613 it was as second of 193 graduates. He remained at Trinity as, what we would call now, a teaching assistant, until in 1618 he was appointed deputy to the University Orator. The Orator was responsible for all the university’s communications with Crown, government and benefactors; the equivalent of modern day public relations, although with a firmer grasp of classical orator. One of Herbert’s earliest letters as Orator in his own right was to the King, James I, thanking him for the King’s gift of his Opera Latina; Herbert shows a fine gift for the rhetorical pyrotechnics and obsequiousness that such a task required:

Scotland was too narrow for thee to be able to fully unfold thy wings from the nest… What didst thou do thereupon? Thou didst take possession of all the British Isles.³

It would seem at this time that Herbert’s career was following a conventional enough path: Cambridge, preferment, court and diplomacy. It was the career of his older brother, Edward: by 1620 Edward was English ambassador to the French court. Certainly in surviving letters to his step-father, Sir John Danvers, (Magdalene married again in 1609, to a man who was two years younger than Edward and only nine years older than George), Herbert seems to be pleased with the status and gaiety of the position of orator.

However, the pleasure and the ambition did not survive. In the late 1610s and early 1620s Herbert lost a number of relatives, including four of his siblings. His health, never strong, suffered in the murk and mists of Cambridge. After 1621 we have precious little record of his official work as Orator. The Herberts’ star was on the wane. Edward was blamed, unfairly, for the initial failure of the marriage negotiations between the Prince of Wales and Princess Henrietta Maria, and recalled to England in disgrace and financial hardship. Henry Herbert, as Master of the Revels (court appointed censor for the theatre) has permitted a play satirising the increasingly ill King James. Herbert had offended Charles, Prince of Wales and the influential Duke of Buckingham with an oration extolling peace when the two were looking for war against Spain. He was elected to the House of Commons as MP for Montgomery in the inconclusive Parliament of 1624, which was then prorogued. Herbert’s career was going nowhere. No wonder he then explored the only avenue of advancement left open to him: the Church.

When he had become a major fellow of Trinity in 1616 the college statutes required him to be ordained within seven years. Herbert missed the deadline. We don’t know why: perhaps it was his poor health. In any case, in November 1624 he petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury for permission to be excused the statutory notice period for ordination as a deacon (a year) and for him to be allowed to be ordained at any time by John Williams, Bishop of Lindcylene. We have no record of when the ordination took place, although Williams presented Herbert with the living of Llandinam in Montgomeryshire in December 1624 (curiously to our way of doing things, Herbert need not necessarily have been ordained to receive the income of the parish!), and by July 1526 he has made canon of Lincoln Cathedral and held the benefice of Leighton Ecclesia (Leighton Bromswold) in Huntingdonshire.

At first, Herbert seems to have taken upon this parochial responsibilities as no more than a means of accessing some money. With the canonry and the parish came stipends. His installation in the cathedral had to be by proxy, as that day he was delivering the University oration to the Duke of Buckingham. Even so, the stipends were not large, and with them came the responsibility to rebuild the decayed chancel of Leighton, estimated at more than 2,000 pounds. Some friends organised the appeal for him, the seventeenth century equivalent of the thermometer outside the church building. Leighton had become more of a drain than a resource. Again, Herbert had reached a dead end.

Then three things happened which changed the course of his life. First, he visited his great friend from university, Nicholas Ferrar, at Ferrar’s new home in Little Gidding. Nick Ferrar had been a student at Clare College, and, following a number of years travelling on the continent (learning Dutch, almost died of a fever in Marseilles, and walked the 500 miles from Madrid to San Sebastian when his money ran out), he had settled back in London working for the family merchant-adventurer business. Unhappily, with the failure of the Virginia Company in 1623, Ferrar’s family lost an enormous amount of money. In an attempt to limit their losses, and to prosecute those responsible for the failure, Nick became an MP, and with Sir John Danvers, Herbert’s step-father, he was a prime mover of the impeachment of the Earl of Middlesex, whom he blamed for his family’s financial loss. By 1625 Ferrar had withdrawn from public life, moving to Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire with his mother and family. Once there, wishing to be chaplain to the large household, he had himself ordained deacon by William Laud, then Bishop of St David’s, in Westminster Abbey. The small community, later mocked as an “Arminian nunnery”, lived a life of daily prayer (scrupulously following the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer) and study, for which purpose Ferrar wrote a harmonisation of the Gospels. Ferrar and Herbert shared a deep and abiding friendship. Herbert’s second biographer (the first was Ferrar himself) wrote:

… they loved each other most entirely, and their very souls cleaved together most intimately, and drove a large stock of Christian intelligence together long before their deaths…⁴

The example of his friend, withdrawing from public life, must have influenced Herbert greatly. Then in 1627 his mother died.

Magdalene had been ill for more than five years. The sorrow that her illness and death brought her son can be seen in the personal tributes he paid her: in 1622, the poem-letter To his Mother, in her sickness, and, following her death, a poem in Latin and Greek, published as Memoriae matris sacrum. This was Herbert’s first ‘personal’ poem to be published. John Donne, by now Dean of St Paul’s, preached at Magdalene’s memorial service in July 1627. In his sermon, Magdalene is shown to be a well-rounded person, faithful, forbearing and lovable:

… in the doctrine and discipline of that Church, in which, God sealed her, to himself, in Baptism, she brought up her children, she assisted her family, she dedicated her soul to God in her life, and surrendered it to him in her death. And, in that form of Common Prayer, which is ordained by that Church, and to which she had accustomed herself with her family, twice every day, she joined with that company which was about her death-bed, in answering to every part thereof, which the Congregation is directed to answer to, with a clear understanding, with a constant memory, with a distinct voice, not two hours before she died.⁵

By the end of the summer of 1627 Herbert had resigned from his university post. He turned from the possibility of both academic and courtly preferment. With the influence of Nicholas Ferrar, and sorrow of his mother’s death and the impression made upon him by Donne’s memorial, Herbert now resolved to find his future in the service of the Church.

Herbert moved to Wiltshire, to stay with his step father’s elder brother. While at Dauntsey he met and married Jane Danvers in March 1629. The newly-weds lived with Herbert’s mother-in-law until April 1630 when he was presented as Rector of the parish of Fugglestone-with-Bemerton near Salisbury. This was Herbert’s first true ‘living’, as we would understand it today. He remained as Rector of Bemerton until his death.

From Herbert’s reputation and role as the exemplar of Anglican parochial clergy, one might be forgiven in thinking that Herbert served the people of Fugglestone- with- Bemerton for many, many years. In fact, he remained in post for less than three years. When Herbert took the living he was still a deacon; he was not priested until September 1630, four months after his curate! And it should not be thought that Herbert lost himself in rural life, like a pastoral version of the slum-priests of the nineteenth century. Bemerton, now a suburb of Salisbury, was even in the seventeenth century only a short stroll from the Cathedral Close. Walton tells us that twice a week Herbert walked to the Cathedral for evensong, and then spent the evening playing the lute and singing with his friends, often in the South Canonry (now the house of the Bishop of Salisbury). Within his parish lay the village of Wilton and Wilton Hall, the seat of his relations, the earls of Pembroke. It was his well-placed family who request Herbert’s presentation to the living. He became confident and spiritual director to Lady Anne Clifford, wife of the fourth earl.

Herbert’s poor life worsened towards the end of 1632, when he was obliged to employ a second curate for the discharge of his duties. By late winter 1633 he was dying of consumption. He died on 1 March 1633; a month before his fortieth birthday, a priest for two and a half years.

So why should we remember this man? An academic who never fulfilled his schoolboy promise; a courtier who found the politics of court too difficult to break into; a clergyman who held benefices in plurality and in absentia; a parish priest for less time than a modern day curacy; a parochial theorist rather than a practitioner?

The poems! is the easiest answer. The man was a genius poet, and his verse is one of the glories of the English language and English church. As Kenneth Mason says, in a little pamphlet published by the Sisters of the Love of God, “it is, indeed, through his poetry that Herbert continues to minister to us… his priesthood is in his poetry.”⁶ Perhaps so, although it was not always thought to be the case. His major collection of poems, The Temple, was published posthumously in 1633, and went through thirteen editions by 1709 (Charles I even having a copy during his imprisonment at Carisbrook Castle during the English Civil War). But in the eighteenth century he fell out of fashion. There was no new edition of The Temple until 1799. He was thought to be no more than a clever, but ultimately sterile, technician: Dryden mocked the poets who lived in “Acrostick land”. His star began to rise in the early years of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, who in later life came to champion Herbert, described Herbert’s standing in 1930s England thus:

… his figure is preserved… as one of genuine though rather conventional piety… we go to Donne for poetry and to Crashaw for religious poetry: but that Herbert deserves to be remembered as the representative lyricist of a mild and tepid church.⁷

Curiously, Eliot goes on to say that Herbert’s poetry works precisely because of his faith. He doubts that Herbert would have been more than a versifier without the structure and focus of his faith: “you will not get much satisfaction from George Herbert unless you can take seriously the things which he took seriously himself and which made him what he was”⁸. By 1962, Eliot had expanded the bounds of Herbert’s explicability and applicability. It is no longer necessary to read Herbert solely as an “aid to devotion”, although his work functions very well for that purpose. Rather, now Herbert may be read as a guide, the guide, to spiritual struggle:

When I claim a place for Herbert among those poets whose work every lover of English poetry should read and every student of English poetry should study, irrespective of religious belief or unbelief, I am not thinking primarily of the exquisite craftsmanship, the extraordinary metrical virtuosity, or the verbal felicities, but of the content of the poems… [They]… form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling, and enlarge the understanding of those readers also who hold no religious belief and find themselves unmoved by religious emotion.⁹

Part of this openness and approachability in Herbert comes from his use of the English language. Sometimes, reading him, it is difficult to remember that Herbert died before the English Civil War, that great convulsion of politics, society, establishment, and, not least, language. Often the 1640s acts as a watershed for the modern reader, after which English poetry and prose can be simply ‘read-off’ the page and before which effort and concentration on the process of reading has to be paid in order to comprehend the writer’s meaning. And yet Herbert, once he left the florid Jacobean requirements of the Orator’s office behind him, seems to be immune to the syntactical complications and allusive vocabulary of his contemporaries. Look at this poem, Praise I:

To write a verse or two is all the praise,
That I can raise:
Mend my estate in any ways,
Thou shalt have more.
I go to Church; help me to wings, and I
Will thither fly;
Or, if I mount unto the sky,
I will do more.Man is all weakness; there is no such thing
As Prince or King:
His arm is short; yet with a sling
He may do more.
A herb distill’d, and drunk, may dwell next door,
On the same floor,
To a brave soul: Exalt the poor,
They can do more.

Oh raise me then! Poor bees, that work all day,
Sting my delay,
Who have a work, as well as they,
And much, much more.

Within the whole poem there is no word of more than two syllables. Simple phrases work as hard as the bees of the poem, with a plainness in what they signify, and yet, by their placing and their subjects, leading to layers of deeper meaning: “help me to wings”, “may dwell next door”, “and much, much more”. Herbert writes in a vernacular voice, there is no special ‘religious tone’ and yet, as Peter Porter says, in this poem the “metaphysical pressure is high”.¹⁰

Herbert’s poetry is now part of the canon of English literature, familiar enough to be quoted in book titles and the names of radio programmes. He does not quite have the status of Shakespeare, but that has not stopped two American academics from producing a concordance of Herbert’s vocabulary¹¹, and Shakespeare doesn’t have any of his poetry appearing in hymn books of the church! Even so, it is not for his poems that Herbert is the target of any Anglican Lin-Chi. It is for a book published, like his poems, posthumously, The Priest to the Temple, or, probably more accurately, The Country Parson.

Although the book was written during Herbert’s time in Bemerton (the preface, from the author to the reader, is dated 1632), it was not published until 1652, as part of the compilation by Barnabas Oley, Herbert’s Remains, which also included Oley’s brief biography and Herbert’s collection of proverbs, Jacula Prudentum. 1652 was at the height of the English Republic, and the Church of England had been suppressed, priests, bishops and liturgy, replaced by a Presbyterian establishment. It is probably that Herbert’s work was published only because of his family connections to the winning side in the Civil War; his step-father, Sir John Danvers, was a signatory to the death warrant of Charles I. Even so, The Priest to the Temple was presented as “an act of homage to the pre-Civil War Church of England”¹². The editor’s supplied title, as well as being a canny piece of marketing, reminding readers of those lovely poems from The Temple, is also provocative: ‘priestly’ ministry was one of the hated tenets of the Laudian church, and had been abolished along with prelates and other popish practices. To call the book by that title was as goading as publishing a work entitled A Jihadist’s Handbook in contemporary America.

And yet we should not think that Herbert is an unambiguous champion for the ‘High Church’ party. Although in the thirteenth chapter, ‘The Parson’s Church’, he quotes the great Laudian slogan of “Let all things be done decently and in order”, he qualifies it with the addition “let all things be done to edification”: the rituals of the church were to some degree for the teaching of the congregation, unlike the Laudian ideal where they were for the glorification of God. Although the church should be well looked after, kept clean and in good repair, Herbert deliberately refers to a communion table and not a (Laudian) altar; he denies the holiness of objects, instead preferring to “keep the middle way between superstition and slovenliness”. Although he recommends kneeling to receive the sacrament, he refuses to demand it, saying that “contentious in a feast of Charity is more scandal than any posture” (Ch. 22). He regards his stewardship of the church building, for the glory of God and the benefit of the parishioners, to be in keeping with Scripture, unlike those who “deny Scripture to be perfect”, that is, who prefer church tradition to be the guide in such matters. And the ultimate irony is that The Country Parson was refused a licence to be printed in 1640/1, by the Laudian authorities who appropriated him as their champion only a dozen years later!¹³

The Country Parson is a comprehensive and concise work; thirty seven chapters, the longest no more than 1600 words, with an assumption of the natural breadth of a parson’s responsibilities. The work begins with a brief discussion of the nature of pastors, and their diversity, chaplains (to universities and great houses) and parish priests. Herbert makes it clear in the first sentence of the work what he believes is the purpose of all these different types of parson: “A Pastor is the Deputy of Christ for the reducing of Man to the Obedience of God” (Ch. 1 Of A Pastor). Then he passes through the nature of the parson’s life (“holy, just, prudent, temperate, bold, grave in all his ways”), the range of his education, to the two major responsibilities praying and preaching. The way in which the parson manages his time, leisure and work, and his household, demonstrate to his parishioners that “his family is a School of Religion”.

Much time is spent on describing the responsibilities of what we would call pastoral visiting, but that Herbert refers to as being on ‘circuit’ or ‘sentinel’. He is to visit his parishioners so that he may see them in their natural environment, away from the best behaviour of Sunday best. His task is to exhort and teach in all his visits, even assisting in lessons for reading and writing. As for the parish poor, “neither disdaineth he to enter into the poorest Cottage, though he even creep into it, and though it smell never so loathsomely. For both God is there also, and those for whom God died”. Visiting the poor is greater comfort to them than visiting the rich, and it aids in the parson’s own self-humiliation.

This concentration on the (beneficial) effects of ministry upon the minister gives us a clue to a proper understanding of what The Country Parson (the book) and who the country parson (the person) both are. As Herbert himself says in the preface, “I have resolved to set down the Form and Character of a true Pastor, that I may have a Mark to aim at: which also I will set as high as I can, since he shoots higher that threatens the Moon, than he that aims at a Tree.” The book and the person are ideals, marks at which to aim. This is not a simple practical handbook; it is, rather, a different genre, a ‘character’ book.

The ‘character’ genre was one of the most popular in the early seventeenth century. It was based upon the template set by the classical author Theophrastus (c.370 BC – c.285 BC) in his book The Characters. There Theophrastus vigorously and bitingly describes the personification of various moral characteristics for the edification of his readers: although the pen portraits might be entertaining, through wit, satire and abuse, character writing had an ethical purpose. Elizabeth Clarke makes this connection between The Country Parson and its parent genre clear. Herbert’s original title for the work was The Country Parson, His Character; it is written in short, pithy chapters, each beginning with the subject under consideration, “The Country Parson is sincere and upright in all his relations”; it was originally published in the most common format for character writing, duodecimo (handy, pocket size); each chapter is written in the present tense and concludes with a pithy, didactic ending (Clarke calls them “sententious”): “Do well, and right, and let the world sink.”

Much of the model that Herbert sets out shows his training and employment in rhetoric. In order for the pastor to be able, as the opening chapter says, to reduce man to the obedience of God, then the pastor needs to understand himself in didactic and rhetorical terms. First, the Parson lives an exemplary life, in which the Christian life “is most seen” by his parishioners (Ch. 3 The Parson’s Life). Second, the Parson should study the reactions of his parishioners to all his teaching, spoken and modelled, and amend the mode of his teaching accordingly: “he observes who marks, and who not; and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich.” (Ch. 7 The Parson Preaching). Although the Parson’s normal mood should be sadness, fixed as he is upon the cross of Christ and the sin and misery of the world, occasionally he “condescends to human frailties both in himself and others; and intermingles some mirth in his discourses occasionally, according to the pulse of the hearer.” (Ch. 27 The Parson in Mirth).

Third, the Parson should not be afraid of using correction and reproof in his dealings with his parishioners: “the Country Parson, where ever he is, keeps God’s watch; that is, there is nothing spoken or done in the Company where he is, but comes under his Test and censure” (Ch. 18 The Parson in Sentinel). He does allow the Parson a modicum of leeway in when to censure: “those that the Parson finds idle, or ill-employed, he chides not at first, for that were neither civil, nor profitable; but always in the close, before he departs from them” (Ch. 14 The Parson in Circuit).

There is much in The Country Parson which remains of interest to the historian of the Caroline Church. It shows us examples of via media between Laudianism and the Calvinistic pressures of the Puritans in a typical parish. It gives us an idea of social relationships in the English countryside. It shows what skills and education were valued and available to the Church’s clergy. There are also elements within it that remain useful for today’s clergy: its understanding of human psychology still rings true. For example, the parson should, over the course of a year, invite the entire parish to dine with him, and he should make it clear that the entire parish will be invited, “because country people are very observant of such things, and will not be persuaded, but being not invited, they are hated” (Ch. 11 The Parson’s Courtesy). Furthermore, Herbert assumes that the parson will be and ought to be available to the whole of society. This is still part of the Church of England’s self-understanding (formed in no small measure by the Church’s devotion to Herbert’s work).

But there are some passages in the work which only go to show exactly how separated we are from the time and values of Herbert. Which priest today would regard it as his duty to admonish his parishioners, when found in their work, to “dive not too deep into worldly affairs”, and reminding them not “to labour for wealth and maintenance, as that they make not that the end of their labour, but that they many have wherewithal to serve God the better, and to do good deeds”? (Ch. 14 The Parson in Circuit). Which priest today would tick off the gentry who arrive late for the service, and not expect to get his name in the local newspaper? Which priest today would regard it as even possible to make his children first Christians, then patriots: “the one he owes to his heavenly Country, the other to his earthly, having no title to either, except that he do good to both”? (Ch 10 The Parson in his House).

But Herbert was a parish incumbent for less than three years, and a priest for even less time than that. He lived and worked in a community of no more than 500 people¹⁴, and he undertook his work with at first one and then a second curate. He had a private income, and, away from the intrigues of London, Westminster, and the university towns, he ministered in a society that was stable after the chaos of the previous hundred years. Like all good popular icons, he died young, and left a beautiful body (of work). It is instructive although ultimately unfair, to imagine how Herbert would have managed parish life in the turbulence of the Civil Wars. Would he have remained loyal to the Crown (as his biographer Barnabas Oley did) and been evicted from his living, or would he have taken the side of the Parliament (as his step-father John Danvers did), and been evicted from his convictions? Would the example of The Country Parson have been fatally compromised by the trimming, or otherwise, of its author?

There is no great fruitfulness in pressing this particular thought experiment. The fact is that Herbert died within three years of arriving in Bemerton, having had no time to seek preferment or employment away from his little Wiltshire suburb. We have the biography and the text we have, and “George Herbert, Priest, Poet, 1633” is there in the Common Worship calendar for 27 February.

The beauty of George Herbert’s work, setting aside the beauty of his language, lies in the romanticism of his story, the bucolic vision described by Waugh in 1907. His story is a triumph of the mythos of the Church of England, the story we tell ourselves, to root ourselves in the soil and society of England, to show that despite all the vicissitudes of the centuries, reformations, dissolutions, indolence, decay, revivals, disputes and decline, we are both the Church of England and the Church of England. This land is our land, and George Herbert is the guarantor of our title to it.

1. Arthur Waugh, introduction to George Herbert: Poems (Oxford: OUP, The World’s Classics, 1907). Quoted in T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, Writers’ and Their Work Series (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994 [1962]) p. 20. [↩]
2. Edward Herbert, The life of Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury written by himself, ed. J. M. Shuttleworth (Oxford: OUP, 1976), p. 36. [↩]
3. In The complete works in verse and prose of George Herbert; for the first time fully collected and much enlarged; edited by Alexander B Grosart (London: printed for private circulation Robson and Sons, printers, 1874) Vol 3, p. 449. Seemingly this is the only translation of Herbert’s orations into English. [↩]
4. Barnabas Oley, ‘A Prefatory View of the Life of Mr Geo. Herbert’ (1652) in C. A. Patrides ed, George Herbert: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 79 (spelling and punctuation modernized). [↩]
5. John Donne, ‘A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers’, from The Sermons of John Donne, edited by Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62), Vol 8, pp. 90-91 (spelling and punctuation modernized). [↩]
6. Kenneth Mason, George Herbert Priest and Poet, (Oxford: SLG Press, 1980), p. 1. [↩]
7. T. S. Eliot, ‘George Herbert’ in The Spectator, 12 March 1932. Reprinted in C. A. Patrides ed, George Herbert: The Critical Heritage, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p.333, 334. [↩]
8. T. S. Eliot, ‘George Herbert’, Spectator, p. 335. [↩]
9. T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, (Writers’ and Their Work), p. 25. [↩]
10. Peter Porter, ‘Introduction’ in T. S. Eliot, George Herbert, (Writers’ and Their Work), p. 9. [↩]
11. Mario A. Di Cesare and Rigo Mignani, A concordance to the complete writings of George Herbert, (Cornell concordances), (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). [↩]
12. Elizabeth Clarke, ‘The Character of a Non-Laudian Country Parson’ in Review of English Studies Vol 54 (Sept 2003), p. 480. [↩]
13. See the fascinating description of the publication history of The Country Parson in Clarke, ‘Character’. [↩]
14. and probably many fewer than that. Fugglestone with Bemerton only had 500 people living there at the time of the 1801 census, in 111 houses. [↩]