Puritanism, in the seventeenth century itself Wales stood by the Church and the Cavalier cause. The most popular Welsh poet of the seventeenth century, Hugh Morris, to whose home George Borrow made a memorable pilgrimage, was an ardent Royalist, and lived long enough to sing, after the Restoration, a 'Lament of the Roundheads' in a vein of exultant satire of which even Butler might have been proud. The loyalty of Wales was secured mainly by the adhesion of the great Welsh families to the Royalist cause; and with two of these noble families both Herbert and Vaughan claimed connexion.

George Herbert was descended, on his mother's side, from two of the greatest princes of mediaval Wales. The Silurist Vaughans were at no time so powerful and highly-placed a family as that of which the house of Pembroke was the head; but Henry Vaughan also could point to a distinguished and romantic ancestry. Both Vaughan and Herbert were by training and tradition 'scholars and gentlemen,' in the best sense; and in men who so well combined intellectual and religious culture we find the most enlightened and lovable, if not the most intense and active, religious type of the time. Of Traherne we cannot speak with equal certainty. His poems throw no light upon either his political or his ecclesiastical proclivities, one of their prime charms being, indeed, their appeal to what is all but a universal religious sentiment. We know, however, that he was at one time rector of Credenhill in the county of Hereford, and afterwards chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who was made Lord Keeper of the Seals in 1667. On the strength of these biographical facts, and of further evidence furnished by his prose writings, Mr Dobell is justified in coming to the pious conclusion that Traherne's 'deeply fervent and religious nature found in the national faith, as George Herbert had found before him, the peace and satisfaction which he could find nowhere else.'

George Herbert was so exemplary a churchman that to a host of readers his churchmanship has been one of the main recommendations of his poetry. He also owes not a little of his popularity to Walton, who has extolled him as a pattern of virtue to all posterity, and especially to his brethren of the clergy.' The clergy, in their turn, have been sedulous in prescribing his poems as aids to

devotion; and 'The Temple,' to judge by the number and the artistic variety of new editions of the book, has never been so widely read as it is to-day. Henry Vaughan was, in his way, as loyal an Anglican as Herbert; but, being a mere country doctor, and having an occasional turn for secular verse, he has never appealed with the same intimacy as the rector of Bemerton to those who read poetry as a devotional exercise. George Herbert is indeed, not excepting even Keble, as much the pattern poet as he is the pattern country parson of the Anglican Church. The very framework, so to speak, of many of his poems is ecclesiastical; and the atmosphere of all of them is redolent of the parsonage and its precincts. Even Nature, when he walks abroad with her, speaks to him in the language of the sanctuary; the whole visible world is to him but a tissue of ministries and sacraments and divine symbols.

'I cannot ope mine eyes

But Thou art ready there to catch
My morning soul and sacrifice.'

Trees speak to him, not of beauty, but of service-of 'fruit or shade'; were he himself but a tree,

'at least, some bird would trust

Her houshold to me, and I should be just.'

In another poem he wishes he were an orange-tree, 'that busy plant!'

"Then should I ever laden be,

And never want

Some fruit for Him that dressèd me!'

A flower by the wayside leads him into a homily upon the common vicissitudes of life, and to the personal aspiration

'O, that I once past changing were

Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!'

It is in this poem on 'The Flower' that we meet with what is, perhaps, the best example in Herbert's work of this spiritual interpretation of Nature, in which he is, in general, so inferior to Vaughan.

'Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recover'd greenness? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother root, when they have blown,
Where they together

All the hard weather,

Dead to the world, keep house unknown.'

Passages of this imaginative quality occur but very seldom in Herbert's poetry. He was altogether too introspective, too deeply absorbed in the contemplative study of his own soul, to discover a soul in nature. On the other hand, the visible images and symbols of the Church were full of poetical suggestion to him. The church porch, the church floor, the altar, even the church lock and key are symbols of some spiritual truth or moral duty. The Church herself, the British Church' of the Reformation, presenting

'A fine aspect in fit array,

Neither too mean nor yet too gay,'

takes bodily shape in his imagination-an apparition of ideal beauty, whose graces deserve as glowing a tribute as those of some 'not impossible She' who charms the profane amorist.

'I joy, deare Mother, when I view
Thy perfect lineaments, and hue
Both sweet and bright.

Beauty in thee takes up her place
And dates her letters from thy face,

When she doth write.'

So completely, indeed, has George Herbert subdued his Muse to the service of the Church that, to many people, he stands pre-eminently as the 'Church of England man of his time. The late Mr Shorthouse, for example, wrote a eulogy not so much of the poet as of the churchman who typifies the exquisite refinement which is the peculiar gift and office of the Church of England.' He is the ascetic priest who was also a fine gentleman, with his fine cloth, his cambric fall and his delicate hands.' It is such men as he and Nicholas Ferrar who were the

true founders of the Church of England.' They'revealed the true refinement of worship,' they united delicacy of taste in choice of ornament and of music with culture of expression and of reserve, and they showed that this was not incompatible with devoted work and life.'

6

It is a pity that Mr Shorthouse's preoccupation with Herbert's virtues as the model Anglican should appear to have led him to disparage somewhat unduly his qualities as a poet. Although he introduced a popular facsimile reprint of the first edition of 'The Temple,' Mr Shorthouse doubted whether Herbert's poetry will ever be generally popular again.' He did, however, claim for it 'a strength of expression and a reality of feeling which will always ensure to it an audience fit, if few.' He might have added that it is just this 'reality of feeling' which will make it impossible to impose upon readers of 'The Temple' what one may call an ecclesiastical test of fitness; there are plenty of robust lovers of poetry outside the Anglican communion who will insist upon claiming fellowship with George Herbert. But strength of expression' is not, we should say, an obviously striking characteristic of his poetry. He was, indeed, a more even and accomplished craftsman in verse than Crashaw, Vaughan, and the rest of the religious lyrists; but both Vaughan and Crashaw, at their best, are masters of a greater language and of clearer accents than he. Such a majestic strain, for example, as that of the well-known lines in 'Church Monuments,' where he sings of

'this heap of dust,

To which the blast of Death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last,'

is quite foreign to Herbert's usual manner. Vaughan's flashes of inspiration, or bursts of great utterance, were intermittent enough, but they far outnumber Herbert's, and reach a much higher level of poetry. When Vaughan writes

'Where are you, shoreless thoughts, vast tenter'd hope, Ambitious dreams, aims of an endless scope,

Whose stretch'd excess runs on a string too high
And on the rack of self-extension die?'

or-listening to 'a shrill spring tuning to the early day'— 'I summon'd Nature; pierc'd through all her store; Broke up some seals which none had touched before, and having past

Through all the creatures, came at last

To search myself, where I did find

Traces, and sounds of a strange kind.

Here of this mighty spring I found some drills
With echoes beaten from th' eternal hills';

or the more familiar lines

'I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driv'n by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow mov'd; in which the world
And all her train were hurl'd,'

he displays at once a range of imagination and a power of expression of which Herbert was incapable.

Herbert, however, must be adjudged the Silurist's superior in uniform excellence of style and in technical accomplishment. He has, it is true, defective rhymes and strained conceits in plenty, but he is not on either count so flagrant and careless a sinner as Vaughan. While he is much given to fantastic experiment in his stanzaic forms, his verses show, on the whole, a saving regard for structural symmetry and coherence. Even in the stock examples of 'The Altar' and 'Easter Wings' the curious emblematic form is adapted to a tolerably pleasing metrical movement. The pursuit of anagrams, acrostics, and emblematic devices of all sorts became a disease of the smaller poets of the seventeenth century; and Herbert was so far responsible for spreading the epidemic that Dryden must have had him in mind when he consigned Shadwell to that 'peaceful province in Acrostic-land' where he might

'wings display and altars raise,

And torture one poor word ten thousand ways.'

Herbert is no word-torturer, in Dryden's sense, but he must be held to have wasted a good deal of ingenuity