Herbert’s works are— The Temple (1631); a few miscellaneous poems; a collection of proverbs entitled Jacula Prudentum (1640); and The Country Parson, which did not appear till 1652. The Temple is a collection of religious poems marked by unity of sentiment and inspiration. The chief faults of the book are obscurity, verbal conceits, and a forced ingenuity which shows itself in grotesque puns, odd metres, and occasional want of taste. In spite of these drawbacks, the quaint beauty of Herbert’s style and his genuine poetical feeling give The Temple a high place in literature. The following poems are the gems of the collection “The Church Porch,” “The Agony,” “Sin,” “Sunday,” “Virtue,” “Man,” “The British Church,” “The Quip,” “The Collar,” “The Pulley,” “The Flower,” “Aaron,” and “The Elixir.” The finest of all is his poem on “Man,” which is Miltonic in its sublimity of conception, and shows how poets, in their loftier moods, often anticipate the discoveries of science and the most far-reaching speculations of philosophy. Herbert and Kehle are the poets of Anglican theology. No book is fuller of devotion vθ the Church of England than The Temple. No poem in our language exhibits more of the spirit of true Christianity. Every page is marked by transparent sincerity, and reflects the beautiful character of “holy George Herbert.”

Among recent editions of Herbert’s works the following may be mentioned :— Works in Prose and Verse, with life by Izaak Walton, and notes by 8. T. Coleridge, 1846; Gilfillan’s edition, in his “Library of the British Poets,” 1853; Willmott’s edition, 1854; Professor Nichol’s edition, 1863; and the Aldine edition by the Rev. Dr A. B. Grosart. For further information consult Walton’s Life, and England's Antiphon, by George Macdonald, 1871.

HERBERT, Henry William (1807-1858), novelist and writer on sports, son of the Hon. and Rev. William Herbert, dean of Manchester, a son of the first earl of Carnarvon, was born in London, April 7, 1807. He was educated at Eton and at Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated M.A. in 1828. Having become involved in debt he emigrated to America, and from 1831 to 1839 was teacher of Greek in a private school in New York. In 1833 he commenced the American Monthly Magazine, which he edited till 1835. In 1834 he published his first novel, The Brothers, a Tale of the Fronde, which was followed by a number of others, all of them obtaining a certain degree of popularity. He was also successful in a series of historical studies, such as The Cavaliers of England, The Knights of England, France, and Scotland, The Chevaliers of France, and The Captains of the Old World, and wrote numerous contributions to magazines; but he is best known for his works on sporting, published by him under the pseudonym of Frank Forester. These include The Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces (1849), Frank Forester and his Friends (1849), The Fish and Fishing of the United States (1850), The Young Sportsman's Complete Manual, and The Horse and Horsemanship in the United States and British Provinces of North America (1858). Herbert was a man of varied accomplishments, but of somewhat dissipated habits. He died by his own hand at New York, May 17, 1858.

HERBERT, Sir Thomas (1606-1682), traveller and author, was born at York in 1606. Several of his ancestors were aidermen and merchants in that city, and they could trace their connexion with the great Herbert family represented by the earl of Pembroke. His grandfather, Aiderman Herbert, who died in 1614, left him real estate of considerable value. He went to Oxford in 1621, and became a commoner of Jesus College, but afterwards removed to Cambridge at the invitation of his mother’s brother, Dr Ambrose Akroyd. Having gone to London, he was introduced to the earl of Pembroke, through whose influence he obtained an appointment in the suite of Sir Dodmore Cotton, who was about to leave as ambassador for Persia in company with Sir Robert Shirley. Sailing in March 1627, they visited the Cape, Madagascar, Goa, and Surat; having landed at Gombroon, they travelled inland to Asharoff, and thence to Cazbeen, where both the chiefs of the expedition died. Herbert reached England again in 1629, and in 1630, to his great disappointment, his patron the earl of Pembroke died suddenly. After this he travelled on the Continent for more than a year. From his return in 1631 till about two years after his marriage in 1632 he retained his ambition for court favour, but failing in this he retired, probably to his estate of Tintern in Monmouthshire, till the outbreak of the civil war, when he sided with the parliament. In 1646 he was appointed to attend the king with his other servants. Becoming a devoted royalist, he continued with his majesty during the last two eventful years of his life, and at the Restoration he was rewarded with the title of baronet (1660). He resided at Westminster till the great plague, when he returned to York and bought Petergate House, where he died on the 1st March 1682.

It was in 1634 that Herbert first published his Description of the Persian Monarchy now bcinge: the Orientali Indyes, Hes and other parts of the Greater Asia and Africk. Four years later a new and enlarged edition appeared under the title of Some Yeares Travels into Africa and Asia the Greed ; a third edition followed in 1661, and a fourth in 1677. The work is evidently the production of a man of considerable scholarship and activity of mind, and altogether ranks as one of the best records of 17th century travel. It is illustrated with woodcuts, among which the sketch of the dodo, the specimen of the cuneiform inscriptions, and the view of Persepolis deserve to be mentioned. Herbert’s Threnodia Carolina, or Memoirs of the two last years of the reign of that unparallelιd prince of ever blessed memory King Charles I., was in great part printed at the author’s request in Wood’s Athenae Oxonicnscs, but it did not appear in its entirety till Dr Charles Goodall published his Collection of Tracts in 1702. A reprint was issued by G. and W. Nicol in 1813. Sir William Dugdale is understood to have received assistance from Herbert in preparing the fourth volume of the Monasticon Anglicanum ; and Mr Drake has printed in the appendix to his Eboracum two papers from Herbert’s pen on the church of St John at Beverley and the collegiate church of Ripon. The best account of Sir Thomas Herbert is that by Robert Davies, F.S.A., York, which appeared in The Yorkshire Archaeological and Topographical Journal, part iii., pp. 182-214 (1870). τ t contains a facsimile of the long inscription on Herbert’s tomb.

HERBERT, Lord, of Cherbury (1582-1648). Edward Herbert, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, soldier, diplomatist, historian, and religious philosopher, was born at Eyton in Shropshire in 1582, and was descended from an ancient line of illustrious soldiers, to which the earls of Pembroke belonged. Sent to Oxford in his twelfth year, he married an heiress, his kinswoman, in his fifteenth, and returned to the university to prosecute his “beloved studies.” He was knighted soon after the accession of James I., and for a year or two fulfilled the functions of sheriff of his county. In 1608 he went abroad, at Paris gaining the esteem and love of the old Constable de Montmorency, and beginning an acquaintance with scholars like Casaubon, Gassendi, and Grotius. Next year he served as a volunteer in the Low Countries under the prince of Orange, whose intimate friend he became, and also took part in the campaigns of 1614 and 1615. Between the latter campaigns he visited Italy, and on his return was arrested in France for recruiting Huguenots for the service of the duke of Savoy. In 1618 he was sent as ambassador extraordinary to the court of France; and, though recalled for a few months through the hostility of the French king’s favourite, he soon returned to Paris as ordinary ambassador. In 1625 he came back to England, where, with the exception of one or more short visits to Paris, he spent the rest of his life. Created Lord Herbert of Castle Island in 1625, he was raised by Charles I. to the English peerage in 1631 as Baron Herbert of Cherbury. In the civil war he sided at first with the court, and subsequently declared for the parliament, but the part he played was not a prominent one. His castle of Montgomery was, however, destroyed during the war, and he received an indemnity for his loss from the parliament. He died 20 th August 1648.

“It is impossible to draw his picture well who hath several countenances,” Herbert says of Henry VIII.; Horace Walpole made a bold attempt to sketch Herbert’s character by declaring that in his case “the history of Don Quixote was the life of Plato.” To his contemporaries Herbert was mainly known as a high-spirited man of the world, of great knightly and courtier-like accomplishments, who, though stiff and stately, was on the smallest actual provocation ready and able to defend his honour with his sword. He maintained the character of ambassador with dignity, but his diplomacy was not attended by much success. It is as author that Herbert is chiefly remembered. And though in 1633 the De Veritate received the official imprimatur of the bishop of Londop’s chaplain, on the strength of the same work the writer was soon after held up to abhorrence as an atheist. As a resolute opponent of empiricism in philosophy, he is unquestionably entitled to rank as one of the heralds of the philosophy of Reid and the Scottish metaphysicians. In the theological sphere ht is justly claimed as the father of English deism, and doubtless exercised a strong influence on the religious thought of England. His views were not so novel as he thought them to be, but he was an original and very independent thinker; and, as his chief work was published but a few years after the Novum Organum, and many years before any of the works of Descartes or Hobbes, Herbert deserves a marked place in the van of modern speculation.

Herbert’s first and most important work is the De Veritate prout distinguitur a Revelatione, aVerisimili, a Possibili, et a Falso (Paris, 1624; translated into French, but never into English). It combines a theory of knowledge with a partial psychology, a methodology for the investigation of truth, and a scheme of natural religion. The author’s method is prolix and often far from clear; the book is no compact system, but it contains the skeleton and much of the soul of a complete philosophy. Giving up all past philosophizings as useless, Herbert professedly endeavours to constitute a new and troe system. Truth, which he defines as a just conformation of the faculties with one another and with their objects, he distributed into four classes or stages :—(1) truth in the thing or the truth of the object; (2)trath of the appearance; (3) troth of the apprehension (conceptus) ; (4) troth of the intellect. The faculties of the mind are as numerous as the differences of their objects, and are accordingly innumerable; but they may be arranged in four groups. The first and fundamental and most certain group is the Natural Instinct, to which belong the κoιvdl ervoιaι, the Notitiae Communes, which are the “received principles of demonstration,” existing in every sane and sound man, against which it is nefas to dispute. The second group, the next in certainty, is the Sensus Internus (under which head Herbert discusses amongst others love, hate, fear, conscience with its communis notitia, and free will); the third is the Sensus Extβrmιs ; and the fourth is Discursus, reasoning, to which, as being the least certain, we have recourse when the other faculties fail. The ratiocinative faculties proceed by division and analysis, by questioning, and are slow and gradual in their movement; they take aid from the other faculties, those of the instinctus naturalis being always the final test. Herbert’s categories or questions to be used in investigation are ten in number,—whether (a thing is), what, of what sort, how much, in what relation, how, when, where, whence, wherefore. No faculty, rightly used, can err “even in dreams”; badly exercised, reasoning becomes the source of almost all our errors. The discussion of the notitiec communes is the most characteristic part of the book. The exposition of them, though highly dogmatic, is at times strikingly Kantian in substance. “So far are these elements or sacred principles from being derived from experience or observation that without some of them, or at least some one of them, we can neither experience nor even observe.” Unless we felt driven by them to explore the nature of things, “it would never occur to us to distinguish one thing from another.” It cannot be said that Herbert proves the existence of the common notions; he does not deduce them or even give any list of them. But each faculty has its common notion; and they may be distinguished by six marks, their priority, independence, universality, certainty, necessity (for the well-being of man), and immediacy. Law is based on certain common notions; so is religion. Though Herbert expressly defines the scope of his book as dealing with the intellect, not faith, it is the common notions of religion he has illustrated most fully; and it is plain that it is in this part of his system that he is chiefly interested. The common notions of religion are the famous five articles, which became the charter of the English deists :—(1) that , there is a supreme god; (2) that he ought to be worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety form the chief part of that worship; (4) that sins should be repented of; (5) that there are rewards · and punishments in another life. To these doctrines, which constitute the faith of the true catholic and orthodox church, it is not easy to add anything that can make men more virtuous or godly. There is little polemic against the received form of Christianity, but Herbert’s attitude towards the church’s doctrine is distinctly negative, though he admits the possibility, under certain conditions, of specific and supernatural revelation. In the De Religione Gentilium (Lond., 1645) he gives what may be called, in Hume’s words, “a natural history of religion.” By examining the heathen religions Herbert finds, to his great delight, that under all their absurdities the five great articles were recognized. The heathen, yearning for the supreme God, saw Him in His works and worshipped Him in the most glorious of His creatures, the heavenly bodies. It was crafty priests who insisted on the necessity of multifarious rites and ceremonies, and developed full-fledged polytheism. The same vein is maintained in the tracts De Causis Errorum and De Religione Laid. Herbert’s first historical work is the Expeditio Buckinghami Duds (1656), an account of Buckingham’s ill-fated expedition in 1627. The, Life and Raigne of King Henry VIII. (1649), in pithy English, is called by Walpole “a masterpiece of historic biography,” but is ill-proportioned and is digested into annals. It abounds in picturesque but prolix accounts of sieges and pageants at home and abroad; the sketch of the Reformation history is so dispassionate as to suggest a lack of keen sympathy with either party. Henry’s character is very leniently judged. The Life of Herbert by Himself (first published by Horace Walpole in 1764) gives a vivacious and interesting account of his early life down to the return from his embassy, dwelling mainly, with something of an old man’s garrulity and a famous man’s vanity, on the romantic and chivalrous incidents in his career. Herbert’s poems, Latin and English, are of small value.

There are sketches of Herbert in Leland’s Deistical Writers, Lechler’s Geschichte des Englischen Deismus, and elsewhere; but the only adequate work is Μ. Charles de Rémusat’s Lord Herbert de Cherbury, sa Vie et ses Oeuvres (Paris, 1874).