The works of Herbert are not extensive: it has therefore been thought advisable to insert in this volume every specimen which remains of him as a poet; though the reader of the present day will be little disposed to agree in the above unqualified eulogy on his Latin compositions. The Synagogue, a collection of poems generally appended to the Temple, has been retained in this edition. They were first printed A.D. 1640, and have been, with much probability, attributed to the Rev. Christopher Harvey, M. A.* By the kindness of the Rev. Dr. Bliss, Registrar of the University of Oxford, the publisher is enabled to add a Poem, ascribed to Herbert, entitled " a Paradox, that the sicke are in a better case then the whole ;" and for some particulars of C. Harvey. The Notes by the late S. T. Coleridge, printed at the end of this volume, occur in a copy of the Temple which formerly belonged to him, and with whom it was a great favorite. He appears to have contemplated editing a selection, with a few slight alterations of the verse. The Greek and Latin Poems entitled Parentalia, which before, on account of their having been discovered too late for insertion, were attached to the Remains, have, in this second edition, been inserted in their proper places: they were found at the end of a Sermon by Dr. Donne, on the death of Lady Danvers, the mother of G. Herbert. In the old copies all the Greek and Latin poems are very incorrectly printed; in the present edition they are greatly amended, by the revision of the Rev. See the advertisement before the Synagogue in this edition. + From a MS. collection of Poems in the Bodleian Library, chiefly by Cambridge men, and written from 1647 to 1658. b J. Allen Giles, late fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, whose critical acumen in the detection of a false reading is not less remarkable than the facility with which he discovers the true one. Another volume similar to the present, entitled Remains, contains the Priest to the Temple, Proverbs, Letters, and other prose writings of Herbert, with his life by Walton and that by Barnabas Oley; and the two volumes together comprise the entire works of George Herbert now first collected. Chancery Lane, |