Many of his sacred poems are a kind of brief religious epigrams in four lines. His "Hymn of the Nativity" is a "_fade_" thing, compared with Milton's. In longer poems he uses rhymed decasyllabic couplets with some skill: "On a Prayer Book Sent to Mrs. M." is a good ode in the irregular verse and conceited manner of the time, but to speak of what Carew does speak of as Mrs. M.'s "heavenly armful" is to remind us of a letter of Robert Burns on a purely secular subject. Save for the Hymn to St. Theresa, with "That not Impossible She," "The Flaming Heart," and some pretty translations, Crashaw, like all the Cavalier poets except Carew, is usually on a low poetic level. But in the pieces mentioned, and above all towards the close of "The Flaming Heart," Singing still he soars and soaring ever singeth. Herbert. George Herbert, author of "The Temple," was born on 13 April, 1593; was of noble descent, and a younger brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. From his fifth to his twelfth year George probably lived at Oxford with his mother. He then went to Westminster School; thence to Trinity College, Cambridge (1609), where he obtained a Fellowship (1616) and early in 1619 was chosen Public Orator. In this capacity he wrote the letters of the University to kings, princes, and the great in general who visited it. He became a friend of Bacon and of Bishop Andrewes, Ludovick, Duke of Lennox, and James, Marquis of Hamilton. As a schoolboy he had written Latin epigrams against the Hildebrand of Scottish Presbyterianism, the learned and truculent Andrew Melville, for whose tyranny in Scotland James VI and I took an unconstitutional revenge when safe on the throne of England. In a war of Latin verse Andrew was very capable of holding his own. Herbert, while at Cambridge, was a somewhat assiduous courtier of "gentle King Jamie," though we do not know that he gratified the monarch by adopting the Scottish and continental pronunciation of Latin and Greek. The death of James probably disappointed any hopes he may have had of State employment. In 1627 he resigned his oratorship, and according to Izaak Walton retired to a country place in Kent where he meditated on the choice of a secular or saintly life. He preferred the saintly, took holy orders, lost his beloved mother in 1627, married Jane Danvers in 1629, and was presented to the living of Bemerton, between Wilton and Salisbury, in the next year. He died in 1633, and Walton must be consulted for "an almost incredible story of the great sanctity of the short remainder of his holy life". On the Sunday before his death he rose, took a musical instrument, and "sang to it such hymns as the angels and he and Mr. Ferrar" (of Little Gidding) "now sing in heaven".