Herbert's "The Pearl" and the Commentary by Franciscus Lucas Brugensis

Canadian poet and essayist Bruce Meyer has justly called George Herbert "one of England's great mercurial few." While no one would quarrel with this appellation, it is all too easy to forget that Herbert remained mercurial – a gifted student and practitioner of language – all his life. Moreover, while "mercurial" usually indicates swiftness and even flashiness to modern ears, we should bear in mind that from the fifth century onwards the influence of Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii caused Mercury to be related to the seven liberal arts. Thus, Herbert can be thought of as "mercurial" in more than one sense. When Meyer goes on to call Herbert "a Cambridge orator coughing in the damp / bed built from pious prayers, forgotten," we must bear in mind that while Cambridge may have forgotten Herbert, he never forgot Cambridge or the lessons he learned there.¹ I shall argue the case here that while the "devotional" Herbert has dominated critical analysis in recent years, that dominance has to a large extent taken place at the expense of the "scholarly" Herbert. While Meyer's image of Herbert coughing in his damp bed is fair enough, I should like to go a little further and imagine him coughing in bed while reading theology there. What I hope to accomplish in this essay, therefore, is to rehearse and highlight what we know about George Herbert's intellectual life and to offer a brief illustration of how that knowledge may assist us in reading one of his poems.

Throughout his short life Herbert was a student, a professed bibliophile, and a devoted reader of texts in both English and Latin. As the Orator for Cambridge University he was obliged to speak in Latin, of course, and being able to write Latin orations is a pretty good indication that he read the language comfortably. Nevertheless, not much criticism of the poetry cites sources written in Latin, perhaps because it does not seem immediately relevant – perhaps for other reasons. For example, the Commentary by Franciscus Lucas Brugensis that I shall adduce here is not only written in a language in which many of us wish we were more comfortable, but is also not readily available. There are two editions in the British Library, but I have been unable to find an edition in an American or Canadian collection. In spite of, or perhaps because of, these difficulties, Herbert's scholarly Latin sources deserve more study than they have usually received. As Gene Edward Veith has noted, "a great deal of historical scholarship remains to be done. Much of the evidence that will help us understand seventeenth-century verse remains undetected, unread, or misunderstood."²

My main goal today is to focus on a work by Lucas Brugensis that falls into the category of "unread" in Veith's schema, and my secondary aim is to show how knowledge of Lucas's Commentary may help us with a reading of Herbert's "The Pearl." But most of all I want to modify the influence of Walton's portrait of him as a frustrated courtier changed to a devoted priest, and show him as I think he should be shown: in the company of lifelong readers of scholarly texts. Eleanor Rosenberg, in her work on Leicester: Patron of Letters, is very helpful in this regard when she describes the English renaissance reader:

The Elizabethan of our fancy is a dashing fellow with a feather in his bonnet, a witty epigram on his lips, a sword in his hand, and the romantic fire of adventure and love in his eye. So has he been depicted for us by playwrights and novelists, even by some historians. But when we examine the kinds of books prepared for the instruction and pleasure of the Renaissance Englishman, we receive a very different impression. He was a ready buyer of...