ABSTRACT
The ‘Athenian Mercury’, a journal of the last decade of the seventeenth century, tended to praise Herbert as a matter of course. Its editor, John Dunton, is known to have admired Herbert and may have been the author of nearly all the encomiastic references to the poet. The ensuing remarks are in response to a reader who noticed the journal’s partiality for Herbert (‘You have on several Occasions, and sometimes I think without any, commended Herbert’s Poetry’) and who quoted a few lines from Christopher Harvey’s ‘The Synagogue’ in order to protest ‘whether you have not notoriously betray’d your want of Judgment in commending such Stuff as this to the Perusal of your Reader’.
Source: the ‘Athenian Mercury’, vol. 12, no. 22, 6 January 1694.
