The new-drawn net, and her entangled prey, Is't not well done? Seems not an emulous strife He then proceeds to explain his parable, and winds up the Emblem, in his invariable fashion, with several citations from the Fathers, and an epigram of his own making, which runs thus: Be sad, my Heart. Deep dangers wait thy mirth : Hell has her hounds: Earth snares: the Sea a shelf: This is ingenious, rather than poetical; yet on occasions Quarles shows that he can do more than translate a picture into words, and that Pope's sarcasm in the Dunciad is unjust.' The following Emblem represents admirably the general spirit by which the poet is animated, and is a sample of what he can do in his moments of inspiration. The thought may originally have been suggested to him by Raleigh's Lie: False world, thou liest: Thou canst not lend The least delight; Thy favours cannot gain a friend, They are so slight. Thy morning pleasures make an end To please at night. Poor are the wants that thou suppliest ; And yet thou vaunt'st, and yet thou viest With heaven! Fond earth, thou boast'st ; false world, thou liest. Thy babbling tongue tells golden tales Of endless treasure ; Thy bounty offers easy sales Of lasting pleasure; Thou ask'st the Conscience what she ails, And swear'st to ease her; There's none can want where thou suppliest; There's none can give where thou deniest; Alas! fond world, thou boast'st; false world, thou liest. 1 See Dunciad, i. 139: Where the pictures for the page atone, And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own. вы Thou art not what thou seem'st: false world, thou liest. Thy tinsel bosom seems a mint Of new-coined treasure ; A paradise that has no stint. No change, no measure; A painted cask, but nothing in't Vain earth, that falsely thus compliest With man! Vain main, that thus reliest On earth! Vain man, thou dot'st; vain earth, thou liest. As Quarles's view of Nature and life was firmly founded on the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, his style was in no way affected by that of the metaphysical school of "wit," to which the employment of far-fetched metaphors was necessary for the expression of their supersubtle thought. He has more affinity with the theological wits of the earlier part of James I.'s reign, Sylvester and Davies of Hereford, who mainly occupied themselves with the invention of verbal antitheses. His thought is always simple, and his manner of expressing it plain: on the other hand, his language is extremely metaphorical, because metaphor is the natural vehicle of allegory; and he was perhaps the first writer of the theological school to introduce those multiplied images in illustration of a single thought which are so freely used in the poetry of George. Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. In The Feast of Worms, his earliest work, are these lines :— Why, what are men but quickened lumps of earth? A feast for worms; a bubble full of mirth; A looking-glass for grief; a flash; a minute; A painted tomb with putrefaction in it; A map of death; a burthen of a song ; A winter's dust; a worm of five foot long ; 1 A technical term in card-playing. Begot in sin; in darkness nourished; born At this point, as well as in the spirit of contempt in which he writes of the world and its vanities, Quarles's genius touches that of the most famous poet of the theological school in the reign of Charles I., though in other respects the styles of the two are strongly contrasted. George Herbert was the fifth son of Richard Herbert, of Montgomery Castle, and of his wife, Magdalen Newport. He was born on the 5th of April 1593. From Westminster School, where he was sent in 1605, he passed, as a scholar, to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609; he took his B.A. degree in 1613, and his M.A. in 1616. In the latter year he was appointed Rhetoric Reader, and when the Public Oratorship fell vacant in 1619 by the resignation of Sir Francis Nethersole, he was elected to that post, being chiefly anxious to obtain it because it brought him into frequent communication with the Court. "He seldom," says his biographer, Izaak Walton, "looked towards Cambridge except when the King was there, and then he never failed." He had indeed while at Cambridge fixed his hopes on Court preferment, but the opportunity passed away. James I. presented him with a sinecure which had previously been held by Sir Philip Sidney, the rectorship of Whitford, in the diocese of St. Asaph. After this, to quote again the narrative of Walton: In the time of Mr. Herbert's attendance and expectation of some good occasion to move from Cambridge to Court, God, in whom there is an unseen chain of causes, did in a short time put an end to the lives of two of his most obliging and most powerful friends, Lodowick, Duke of Richmond, and James, Marquis of Hamilton; and not long after this King James died also, and with them all Mr. Herbert's Court hopes; so that he frequently took himself to a retreat from London to a friend in Kent, where he lived very privately, and was such a lover of solitariness as was judged to impair his health more than study had done. At last, influenced largely by the persuasions of his mother, he resolved to take deacon's orders, and in 1626 was presented by Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, with the prebend of Layton Ecclesia in that diocese. Here he rebuilt the church at his own expense. His mother died in 1627, and he himself fell into such feeble health that he resigned the Public Oratorship, and left Cambridge. Within two years of his doing this he married Jane, daughter of Charles Danvers of Bainton, in Wiltshire, and about a year afterwards was presented by the King with the living of Bemerton, near Salisbury. Not having been yet ordained priest, and shrinking from the responsibility of the cure of souls, he at first declined the offer, but on the persuasion of Laud, then Bishop of London, he changed his mind, received institution from Davenant, Bishop of Salisbury, and was inducted into the Rectory, 28th April 1630. Having worked in his parish for about two years, he died in it of consumption, and was buried there on the 6th March 1632. Taken in connection with the spiritual utterances of his poetry, the outward facts of George Herbert's life reveal clearly the course of inward feeling which led him away from the business of the world into the bosom of the Church. In the interesting autobiographical glimpses he gives us in his poem called Affliction, we see that he had always been disposed towards religion; but he holds that he had been constantly checked by the will of God from surrendering himself to his own "bias." Of his time at Cambridge he says:- VOL. III Whereas my birth and spirit rather took I was entangled in the world of strife, P Yet, for I threaten'd oft the siege to raise, Thou often didst with academic praise I took thy sweeten'd pill till I came near, I could not go away, nor persevere. When his ambitious hopes were disappointed, and his outlook on the external world darkened, he turned, with the fervour of a religious nature, to the alternative of self-examination : Then cease discoursing, soul; till thine own ground; He that by seeking hath himself once found But he did not seek this self-knowledge by the same philosophic road as the author of Nosce Teipsum. To reach the calm necessary for heavenly contemplation, it was necessary for him to feel directly the presence of God, and from this he was hindered by the intensity of his sense of sin : Ah, was it not enough that Thou By Thy eternal glory didst out-go me? Yet by confession will I come Into Thy conquest. Though I can do nought The man who once against Thee fought. The goal of self-knowledge was to be reached by selfimmolation through the teaching and discipline of the Church. Hence, on his arrival at Bemerton, he seems to have resolved to shut out all distracting views of the world : When at his induction (says Walton) he was shut into Bemerton Church, being left there alone to toll the bell as the law required him, he stayed so much longer than an ordinary time before he returned to his friends that stayed expecting him at the church door, that his friend Mr. Woodnot looked in at |