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Herbert and His Contemporaries Donald ?. Friedman Donne, Herbert, and Vocation Auden said, "A shilling life will give you all the facts";1 but what matters is what we make of them. The biographies by R.C. Bald and Amy Charles are not to be thought of as the "shilling life."2 They have turned the archives into narrative and provided us with the discoverable traces of the curricula vitae of Donne and Herbert, lives which touched at several moments and were "twisted . . . upon one double string"3 amidst a web of familial relationships, poetical competition, and the parallels and differentia that marked their oblique and fitful progress toward priesthood. The reasons for each man's delay in hearkening ultimately to what proved to be an ineluctable vocation are both numerous and obscure, and have provided grounds for scholarly and interpretive contention.4 The most obvious, and not less persuasive for being obvious, is that both Donne and Herbert nurtured for years the ambition — and most of the time the hope — of receiving preferment at Court. "Receiving" is perhaps too pallid a term, in the light of their energetic and at times desperate appeals to well-placed patrons and friends, extending to subtle manipulations and maneuverings among the corridors of Whitehall power, and the study of shifting patterns of allegiance and patronage that governed those whose influence they were trying to exploit. Those ambitions, in turn, were nourished not only by early recognition of unusual rhetorical talents and by a bracing absence of false modesty, but by a social and political system itself which placed great value on the arts of persuasion and representation. Like Ben Jonson, both Donne and Herbert clearly came to understand that their epideictic skills, while they could be merchandised as a desired commodity, were at the same time necessary to maintaining the ascendancy of the courtiers they courted. Lucy Harrington, the Countess of Bedford, for all her 136Donald ?. Friedman prominence within Queen Anne's circle and on the masquing-floor, also measured her position in the larger society by the number and names of poets who wrote, dedicated, or merely made compliments, to her. From the point of view of recent studies in cultural patronage, it is difficult to declare whether the Sidneys and the Herberts lent luster to Jonson, Daniel, Browne, et al., or whether the poets were essential to sustaining the family mythologies and their emblems of privilege and status.5 Both Donne and Herbert began well: they were given "milk and sweetnesses," had their "wish and way,"6 Donne as secretary to the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, and Herbert as the University Orator at Cambridge, a place which he described to his stepfather as one that promised "such . . . Gaynesses, which will please a young man well" (p. 370). Both posts were commonly understood to lead to prominent government positions; but both Donne and Herbert defeated expectations, Donne by shattering convention in his marriage,7 and Herbert by being court-outed, as Walton suggests,8 by the deaths within two years of King James and of Herbert's patrons (Lennox and Hamilton), or by the collapse of the Virginia Company and its attendant scandals, in which Herbert's close friends and relatives were involved.9 Even if these events had not barred the way to the much-desired court employment, both Donne and Herbert were well aware of what Donne characterized as "Lay-scornings of the Ministry,"10 and what Herbert reprehended when he advised the "sweet youth" to whom he addresses "The Church-porch" "to pick out treasures from the earthen pot" (1. 430). Donne was only too conscious of the low esteem in which the clergy was held in his time; and Herbert's family name did nothing to fill the purse of the fifth of seven sons. For much of his adult life after leaving Cambridge he lived in others' houses and with no reliable source of funds. The church did not, in these circumstances, offer a career that could match the Court, at least in worldly allure. In spite of these considerations, or perhaps because of them, the prolonged delay that preceded each man's entry into the priesthood...
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