A Little English Gallery. Louise Imogen Guiney
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years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft, patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley called him.
The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting:
“What man art thou that art so many men,
All-virtuous Herbert?”
even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human.
Her Edward was matriculated in 1595 at University College, Oxford,[1] for which he seemed to retain no great partiality; he bequeathed his books, like a loyal Welshman, to Jesus College, instead, and his manuscripts to the Bodleian Library. In 1598, when he was little more than seventeen, he was wedded to his cousin Mary Herbert, of St. Gillian in Monmouthshire. Her age was one-and-twenty; she was an heiress, enjoined by her father’s will to marry a Herbert or forfeit her estates; she was also almost a philosopher. There was no wild affection on either side, but the marriage promised rather well, both persons having resources; and no real catastrophe befell either in after-life. Much as she desired the match for worldly motives, the chief promoter of it was too solicitous for her tall dreamer of a son, who underwent the pleasing peril of having Queen Bess clap him on the cheek, not to take the whole weight of conjugal direction on her own shoulders. Without undue officiousness, but with the masterly foresight of a shrewd saint, she moved to Oxford from Montgomery with her younger children and their tutors, in order to handle Mistress Herbert’s husband during his minority. “She continued there with him,” says Walton, in his Life of George Herbert, “and still kept him in a moderate awe of herself, and so much under her own eye as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness as might make her company a torment to her child, but with such a sweetness and compliance with the recreations and pleasures of youth as did incline him willingly to spend much of his time in the company of his dear and careful mother.”
It was during this stay that she contracted the chivalrous friendship which has embalmed her tranquil memory. Dr. John Donne (not ordained until 1614, and indeed not Dr. Donne then at all, but “Jack Donne,” his profaner self) had been at Cadiz with Essex, and had wandered over the face of Europe; and he came back, accidentally, to Oxford during the most troubled year of his early prime. It was no strange place to him,[2] who had been, at eleven, the Pico della Mirandola of Hart Hall, and whose relatives seem to have resided always in the town. There and then, however, he cast his bright eye upon Excellence, and in his own phrase,
“—dared love that, and say so, too,
And forget the He and She.”
We can do no better than cite a celebrated and beautiful passage, once more from Walton: “This amity, begun at this time and place, was not an amity that polluted their souls, but an amity made up of a chain of suitable inclinations and virtues; an amity like that of St. Chrysostom to his dear and virtuous Olympias, whom, in his letters, he calls his saint; or an amity, indeed, more like that of St. Hierom to his Paula, whose affection to her was such that he turned poet in his old age, and then made her epitaph, wishing all his body were turned into tongues that he might declare her just praises to posterity.” How these words remind one of the sweet historic mention which Condivi gives to the relations between Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo! The little English idyl of friendship and the great Italian one run parallel in much.
Donne’s trenchant Satires, some of the earliest and very best in the language, were already written, and he was not without the hint of fame. Born in 1573, he was but eight years the senior of Edward Herbert, and not more than a dozen years the junior of Edward Herbert’s mother. To her two sons, also, who were to figure as men of letters, he was sincerely attached from the first, and had a marked and lasting influence on their minds. Donne had the superabundance of mental power which Mr. Minto has pointed out as the paradoxical cause of his failure to become a great poet. He was a three-storied soul, as the French say: a spirit of many sides and moods, a life-long dreamer of good and bad dreams. To his restless, incisive intelligence his contemporaries, with Jonson and Carew at their head, bowed in hyperboles of acclaim. He had a changeful conscience, often antagonized and often appeased. There was a strain in him of strong joy, for he was descended through his mother from pleasant John Heywood the dramatist, and from the father of that great and merry-hearted gentleman, Sir Thomas More. If ever man needed vitality to buoy him over sorrows heavy and vast, it was Donne in his “yeasting youth.” Thrown, through no fault but his own, from his old footholds of religion and occupation, and unable, despite his versatile and alert genius, to grind a steady living from the hard mills of the world, he was in the midst of a bitter plight when the friends worthy of him found a heavenly opportunity which they did not let go by, and made his acceptance of their favor a rich gift unto themselves. Foremost among these, besides Lady Herbert, were Sir Robert Drury of Drury Lane, and a kinsman, Sir Francis Woolly, of Pirford, Surrey, fated to die in his youth, both of whom gave the Donnes, for some nine consecutive years, the use of their princely houses. John Donne had been in the service of the Chancellor, Lord Ellesmere, and lost place and purse by the opposition to his marriage with his “lectissima dilectissimaque,” Anne More, who was Lady Ellesmere’s niece, the daughter of Sir George More of Loxly, Lieutenant of the Tower, and probably a distant cousin of his own. No reverses, however, could beat the pathetic cheer out of him. “Anne Donne,[3] undone,” was one of his inveterate teary jests over the state of things at home. He wrote once, with sickness, poverty, and despair at his elbow: “If God should ease us with burials, I know not how to perform even that. But I flatter myself that I am dying, too, for I cannot waste faster than by such griefs.” Five of his twelve children passed before their father to the grave, the good domestic daughter Constance upholding him always, and keeping the house together. But just as hope dawned with his appointment to the Lectureship of Lincoln’s Inn, heavenward suddenly, with her youngest-born, in 1617, went his dear and faithful wife, whom he laid to rest in St. Clement Danes.
About the time when the remorseful old queen died disdainfully on her chamber-floor at Richmond, the necessities of this family called for daily succors, and with a simple and noble delicacy they were supplied. Nor did they cease. Magdalen Herbert was a “bountiful benefactor,” Donne “as grateful an acknowledger.” His first letter to her from Mitcham in Surrey, dated July 10, 1607, is made up of terse, tender thanks, in his heart’s own odd language. He sends her an enclosure of sonnets and hymns, “lost to us,” says Walton, movingly, “but doubtless they were such as they two now sing in heaven.” Dr. Grosart, with a great show of justice, claims that the sequence called La Corona, and familiar to latter-day readers, are the identical sonnets passed from one to the other. During this same month of July we know that, paying a call in his “London, plaguey London,” and finding his friend abroad,[4]