ABSTRACT
A hostile anonymous essay – nominally a review of the editions by Gilfillan and Willmott (Nos 50 and 51) – commenced innocently enough with a florid ‘sketch’, generally subservient to Walton, of Herbert’s life (‘Herbert’s … last three years were soothed and brightened by the watchful care and beaming smiles of his devoted Jane’). Its hostility surfaced especially in this extract, which follows and extends an attempted evaluation of Herbert’s poems in the light of seventeenth-century practice together with an ‘estimate of their respective merits’. See also above, p. 26.
Source: from an untitled article in the ‘British Quarterly Review’, XIX (1854), 393–8 and 407.
