A Priest To The Temple: Or The Country Parson's Character, And Rule of Holy Life. By Mr. G. Herbert, Orator of the University of Cambridge. The Fourth Edition by Herbert, George

1593-1633 Duodecimo, 6 x 3.6 inches. Fourth edition. A12, a4, B-G12, I8. This clean and charming copy is still bound in its original English calfskin binding. The boards are speckled, the spine is tooled in gilt, even the old label is still intact. The front hinge is starting to crack, but the boards are still firmly attached. We may partly distinguish two poets in Herbert. There is, first, the parish priest of early seventeenth-century England who revered his Church as a chaste mother neither 'painted' nor 'undrest;' who deplored the worm of schism eating away the English rose and (to the disturbance of the Cambridge licenser in 1633) saw Religion standing "on tip-toe in our land, Readie to passe to the American strand;" who celebrated with loving particularity and complete security of belief the meaning of God's temple and worship. It is this poet who can be fully appreciated, in Coleridge's works, only by 'an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church;' and it is to Herbert's writings and life that we owe much of our picture of the order, strength, and beauty of seventeenth-century Anglicanism at its best. But church-bells are heard beyond the stars, and the Anglican parish priest meres with the larger poet, with the very human saint who gives fresh and moving utterance to the aspirations and failures of the spiritual life.