A Reading of George Herbert

200 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY subject's place in history would stand out more clearly if he had included less of such trivia. Nevertheless this blemish does not seriously impair the value of an informative and thorough study. In British Working Class Movements: Select Documents, 17891875 , Professor G. D. H. Cole and Mr. A. W. Filson illuminate the same and earlier developments. Their documents are drawn from varied sources, including the Home Office Papers at the Record Office, the Place and other collections in the British Museum, the George Howell collection at the Bishopsgate Institute, London, and many special monographs on the period. The selections are grouped into twenty-one chapters which combine a topical and chronological treatment, with appropriate annotations on the contents. The main aim throughout is to illustrate, less the economic facts of the time, than the social movements and the ideas behind them, and, as we might expect from the editors, what is included on politics has a profound social interest. One extract from a labour journal aptly pronounces that "Social and political reforms are so intimately interwoven that it is extremely difficult to distinguish one from the other" (pp. 544-5). But, where necessary, the more factual type of document is included. Thus the opening chapter has extracts from Sir F. M. Eden's State of the Poor (1797) and A Report on the State of the Woollen Manufacture (1806). Here as in the former book is clearly shown, especially after the failure of Chartism, the close nexus between the workers and the middle class. The argument for democracy which after the middle of the century came to prevail among the influential leaders of the unions was one that repudiated a narrow class doctrine and class rule. George Howell, a spokesman for the unions in 1865, pleaded that "we seek not to overbalance political power by the substitution of one class influence for another. We seek it for all men without distinction; for on the principle of manhood suffrage, protected by the ballot, class legislation as well as class representation will be no more" (p. 537). The documents also abundantly illustrate how much after 1867 both the Liberal and Conservative parties became anxious to satisfy through the statute book the requests of labour organizations. Collectivism was the price paid for the combined political action of labourers and middle class. A READING OF GEORGE HERBERT! MILLAR MACLuRE Modestly, carefully, Professor Rosemond Tuve here provides, in two essays, a corrective to the approach to poetry, and particularly to metaphysical poetry, of the more intransigent practitioners of the "New lA Reading of George Herbert. By ROSEMOND TUVE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [Toronto: W. J. Gage and Company Limited], 1952. Pp. 215. $5.00. REVIEWS 201 Criticism." The first essay2 is a full-scale attack on Mr. William Empson's analysis of Herbert's "The Sacrifice" in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and the line of argument followed there is repeated throughout the book, but, says Miss Tuve, "I decline to consider myself at war with this critic-or with "The New Criticism," except where it asks what-is-truth? and will not stay for an answer." The "New Critics" (no one is named but Empson, and it is clear that Miss Tuve thinks of them, and with some justice perhaps, as a kind of faceless marching phalanx) are not, then, the enemy, but allies; allies who persist in using an invariable battle plan under all circumstances. Miss Tuvc, who is an able research scholar, suggests at least one variation. This is what she does. She shows that many of the images in Herbert 's poems, which Empson finds, and others who follow his method are likely to find, "conceited," far-fetched, witty in the early seventeenth -century manner, are actually not the inventions of a mind "jumping like a flea," but derived from the traditional images of liturgies, the iconography of books of hours and stained-glass windows, medieval hymns, sermons, glossed Bibles, etc. All of these figures derive ultimately from the typological interpretation of the Scriptures inherited from the Church Fathers and elaborated by the glossators and schoolmen. Because her book is not just a source-study...