We conceive he was otherwise disqualified, that he was too light of weight and too short in stature. He appears to have been of slender figure, and rather under than above the middle standard in height. In another point, indirectly perhaps affecting this same matter, he did not possess that easy, boisterous speech which armed assailants may often be called on to assume, to strike terror into a foe, by throwing him off his guard. He himself acknowledges, later in life, to this vocal defect, when, in writing to Charles II. he admits that he takes up the pen, as he says,--“To ease your Majesty of a trouble incident to the prolixity of speech, and a _natural defect of utterance_ which I accuse myself of.” “The prolixity of speech” any one may imagine, both from the letter in which this passage occurs, as well as in the noble lord’s general correspondence throughout his life; it seems to be a style in which the close of each sentence, or its matter, suggests the next, to be followed again in like manner, until the main subject becomes so overlaid as to be lost in needless verbose amplification. But he could and did write tersely enough on occasion. No man could then better display the admirable art of compressing large meaning into small compass. If eloquence in speaking “troubled” him, eloquent writing assuredly cost him, it would appear, vastly more trouble in the labour of the pen. We suspect that concentration of thought was natural to him, but its elaboration to produce that roundness of period assumed necessary for the style of a courtly gentleman, confused and perplexed him. We imagine the prosy writer, being conversationally sententious; perhaps painfully so to the ears of fashionable society, delighting as it does in the trivialties of such conversation as that which would principally characterise the Court of those days; rendered perhaps only the more irksome by his continuance in its fashionable frivolities for three or more years. A very fair specimen of the mechanical knowledge of the period, when Lord Herbert was finishing his education, is afforded in the work of Henry Peacham, published in 1627, entitled “The Compleat Gentleman.” In his ninth chapter, treating of Geometry, he says: “Out of Egypt, Thales brought it into Greece, where it received that perfection we see it now hath. For by means hereof are found out the forms and draughts of all figures, greatness of all bodies, all manner of measures and weights, the cunning working of all tools; with all artificial instruments whatsoever. All engines of war, for many whereof (being antiquated) we have no proper names; as, Exosters, Sambukes, Catapultes, Testudos, Scorpions, &c. Petardes, Grenades, great Ordinance of all sorts.