The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream,’ wrote Henry Vaughan in the preface to Silex Scintillans, ‘was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse . . . gave the first check to a most flourishing and admired Wit of his time.’ Perhaps this attempt to divert the ‘foul stream’ and check an ‘admired Wit of his time’ may explain why, as he tells us, he at first ‘sought out quaint words and trim invention, curling with metaphors a plain intention/ since in the Sonnet sent to his mother as a New Year’s gift from Cambridge in 1608, he asks :

for undoubtedly some of his poems in their allegorical obscureness and subtlety of expression rival those of the wearers of ‘Venus’ liverie.’ The subtlety, however, Is only in the form in which he has chosen to express familiar religious truths in order to allure those who would be attracted by it.

But, indeed, as Vaughan’s words suggest, it was his own ‘holy life’ that was the first and most powerful element in the remarkable influence he exercised over his contemporaries, and it was this that gave meaning and charm to his poetry.

His mother, the gracious lady whom Donne regarded with such affectionate admiration and used to address as ‘The Lady Magdalen Herbert, of St. Mary Magdalen,’ was a notable woman in her devotion to the education of her seven sons. Her husband had died when Edward, the eldest, was sixteen years old, and George, the fifth son, was four.