THE POEMS ENGLISH AND LATIN OF EDWARD, LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY

Reprint. Original blue cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, with the publisher's monogram in blind to the front panel. A very near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Light spotting to the upper edge of the page block. In the near fine dustwrapper, nicked to the upper outer corner. Not price-clipped (35s. net to the front flap). A very nice copy. Uncommon in cloth and with the dustwrapper.

Herbert of Cherbury, older brother to George Herbert, was the quintessential English renaissance man. A distinguished soldier and diplomat, he was also a theologian, philosopher, historian, and poet. The prose 'De Veritate' and 'De Religione Gentilium' were pioneering and celebrated works, but it is perhaps his small body of poems, most of which were published posthumously in 1665, for which he will be remembered. Often compared to Donne (rather than to his brother George), the poems are difficult, allusive, and concentrated. "For him", Herbert Grierson wrote in his review of this volume, "the metaphysical fashion in poetry was equivalent to the deliberately enigmatical" Grierson cites Ben Jonson who told William Drummond that Donne's lines on Prince Henry were written "to match Sr Edward Herbert in obscureness". Moore Smith's meticulously prepared edition, first published in 1923 (having been delayed because of the war) is, according to Grierson, "so complete and scholarly a piece of work, and Mr Moore Smith is so complete a master of his subject that it is difficult for anyone else to review it at all profitably. [...] It is a great thing to have got his poems buck-washed and red-up, as Carlyle might say, that we may at last see distinctly what was the character and worth of these strange utterances of a very remarkable man; and Mr Moore Smith has done it admirably". The 1968 printing was the first since the volume's original appearance.