His amusing auto-biography ends with an account of a noise from heaven, when he prayed for a sign of the Divine will, whether or not he should print his book. Not many other circumstances of his life are on record. He was raised to the Irish peerage in 1625, and, afterwards, was created an English baron, by the title of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in Shropshire. He published another Latin work, in support of the cause of infidelity, and then gave to the world his History of the Reign of Henry VIII.; a book which has been always characterised, by writers who have never read a line of it, as a master-piece of historic biography; and if gross partiality for his hero, profound ignorance of human nature, imperfect acquaintance with his subject, and a pedantic style, constitute the excellence of memoir-writing, Lord Herbert is an author of the first class. Though he had been raised to the peerage by the Stuarts, yet in the days of Charles I. we find him on the side of the parliament. Montgomery-castle was demolished by the King's troops, and the parliament made him a pecuniary compensation. He removed to London, died in 1648, and was buried in St. Giles's. [Sidenote: His character.] [Sidenote: His inferiority to the knights of yore.] Such was Lord Herbert of Cherbury. His life may be placed in opposition to, rather than in harmony with, the heroes of early chivalric times. He had their courage, it is true, but he had none of their dignity and nobleness, none of their manly grace; and there was a fantastic trifling in his conduct, which their elevated natures would have scorned. He was no Christian knight: the superstition of the Chandos's and Mannys, gross as it was, is not so offensive to the moral sense as the craft and subtlety of Lord Cherbury's intellect, which refined Christianity into deism. We can admire the heroes of the days of Edward III., placing their swords' points on the Gospels, and vowing to defend the truth to the utterance; but how absurd was the fanaticism, and contemptible the vanity, of him who expected that Heaven would declare its will that he should deliver to the world the vain chimeras of his imagination! [Sidenote: Decline of chivalric education.] The history of English chivalry is now fast drawing to a close. We may mark the state of the system of chivalric education in the castles of the nobility. Every great lord, as his ancestors had been, was still attended by several of the inferior nobility and gentry, and such service was not accounted dishonourable. The boys were, as of old, called pages, though perhaps the age for this title somewhat stepped beyond the ancient limit.