A Little English Gallery

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD somewhere devotes a grateful sentence to the women who have left a fragrance in literary history, and whose loss of long ago can yet inspire men of to-day with indescribable regret. Lady Danvers is surely one of these. As John Donne’s dear friend, and George Herbert’s mother, she has a double poetic claim, like her unforgotten contemporary, Mary Sidney, for whom was made an everlasting epitaph. If Dr. Donne’s fraternal fame have not quite the old lustre of the incomparable Sir Philip’s, it is, at least, a greater honor to own Herbert for son than to have perpetuated the race of Pembroke. Nor is it an inharmonious thing to remember, in thus calling up, in order to rival it, the sweet memory of “Sidney’s sister,” that Herbert and Pembroke have long been, and are yet, married names.

Magdalen, the youngest child of Sir Richard Newport, and of Margaret Bromley, his wife, herself daughter of that Bromley who was Privy-Councillor, Lord Chief-Justice, and executor to Henry VIII., was born in High Ercall, Salop; the loss or destruction of parish registers leaves us but 1561-62 as the probable date. Of princely stock, with three sisters and an only brother, and heir to virtue and affluence, she could look with the right pride of unfallen blood upon “the many fair coats the Newports bear” over their graves at Wroxeter. It was the day of learned and thoughtful girls; and this girl seems to have been at home with book and pen, with lute and viol. She married, in the flower of her youth, Richard Herbert, Esquire, of Blache Hall, Montgomery, black-haired and black-bearded, as were all his line; a man of some intellectual training, and of noted courage, descended from a distinguished brother of the yet more distinguished Sir Richard Herbert of Edward IV.’s time, and from the most ancient rank of Wales and England. At Eyton in Salop, in 1581, was born their eldest child, Edward, afterwards Lord Herbert of Cherbury, a writer who is still the puzzle and delight of Continental critics. He is said to have been a beautiful boy, and not very robust; his first speculation with his infant tongue was the piercing query: “How came I into this world?” But his next brother, Richard, was of another stamp; and went his frank, flashing, fighting way through Europe, “with scars of four-and-twenty wounds upon him, to his grave” at Bergen-op-Zoom, with William, the third son, following in his soldierly footsteps. Charles grew up reserved and studious, and died, like his paternal uncle, a dutiful Fellow of New College, Oxford. The fifth of these Herberts, “a soul composed of harmonies,” as Cotton said of him, and destined to make the name beloved among all readers of English, was George, the poet, the saintly “parson of Fuggleston and Bemerton.” Henry, his junior, with whom George had a sympathy peculiarly warm and long, became in his manhood Master of the Revels, and held the office for over fifty years. “You and I are alone left to brother it,” Lord Herbert of Cherbury once wrote him, in a mood more tender than his wont, when all else of that radiant family had gone into dust. The youngest of Magdalen Newport’s sons was Thomas, “a posthumous,” traveller, sailor, and master of a ship in the war against Algiers. Elizabeth, Margaret, and Frances were the daughters, of whom Izaak Walton says, with satisfaction, that they lived to be examples of virtue, and to do good to their generation. None of them made an illustrious match. Margaret married a Vaughan. Frances secured unto herself the patronymic Brown, and was happily seconded by Elizabeth, George Herbert’s “dear sick sister,” who became Mistress Jones. In the south chancel transept of Montgomery Church, where Richard Herbert the elder had been buried three years before, there was erected in 1600, at his wife’s cost, a large canopied alabaster altar-tomb, with two portrait-figures recumbent. All around it, in the quaint and affectionate boast of the age, are the small images of these seven sons and three daughters; “Job’s number and Job’s distribution,” as she once remarked, and as her biographers failed not to repeat after her. But their kindred ashes are widely sundered, and “as content with six foot as with the moles of Adrianus.” This at Montgomery is the only known representation of the Lady Magdalen. Her effigy lies at her husband’s left, the palms folded, the eyes open, the full hair rolled back from a low brow, beneath a charming and simple head-dress. Nothing can be nobler than the whole look of the face, like her in her prime, and reminding one of her son’s loving epithet, “my Juno.” The short-sighted inscription upon the slab yet includes her name.

“God gave her,” says one of her two devoted annalists, who we wish were not so brief and meagre of detail—“God gave her such a comeliness as though she was not proud of it, yet she was so content with it as not to go about to mend it by any art.” Her fortune was large, her benevolence wide-spreading. All the countryside knew her for the living representative of the ever-hospitable houses of Newport and Bromley. “She gave not on some great days,” continues Dr. Donne, “or at solemn goings abroad; but as God’s true almoners, the sun and moon, that pass on in a continual doing of good; as she received her daily bread from God, so daily she distributed it, and imparted it to others.” In these years of her wifehood and widowhood at Montgomery Castle (the “romancy place” dating from the eleventh century, and ruined, like the fine old house at High Ercall, during the Civil Wars), and afterwards at Oxford and London, she reared her happy crew of boys and girls in an air of generosity and honor; training them to habits of hardiness and simplicity, and to the equal relish of work and play. “Herself with her whole family (as a church in that elect lady’s house, to whom John wrote his second Epistle) did every Sabbath shut up the day at night with a general, with a cheerful singing of psalms.” One may guess at young Richard’s turmoil in-doors, and at the little Elizabeth’s soft, patient ways, and think of George (on Sundays at any rate) as the child of content, “the contesseration of elegances” worthy Archdeacon Oley called him.

The fair and stately matron moving over them and among them was not without her prejudices. “I was once,” Edward testifies, “in danger of drowning, learning to swim. My mother, upon her blessing, charged me never to learn swimming; telling me, further, that she had learned of more drowned than saved by it.” Though the given reason failed to impress him, he adds, the commandment did; so that the accomplished Crichton of Cherbury, who understood alchemy, broke his way through metaphysics, and rode the Great Horse; the ambassador, author, and beau, to whom Ben Jonson sent his greeting:

“What man art thou that art so many men, All-virtuous Herbert?”

even he lacked, on principle, the science of keeping himself alive in an alien element, because it had been pronounced less risky to die outright! It was a pretty paradox, and one which sets down our high-minded Magdalen as quite feminine, quite human.