The number of his admirers began to grow about one hundred years ago, and it's accurate to say that Herbert is more valued at present than at any time before. Herbert's few early readers included Crashaw, Vaughan, and Traherne, poets who acknowledged him by the sincere compliment of imitation. This was Nicholas Ferrar, the leader of the Anglican religious community at Little Gidding, (commemorated in the last and most ecstatic of Eliot's The Four Quartets). During his lifetime he never published a book, and it is only because Herbert placed the manuscript of The Temple in the hands of a friend that we know of his poems at all. Isaak Walton's The Life of Mr George Herbert opens by telling us, "George Herbert was born the third day of April, in the year of our redemption 1593." But the priest-poet had few readers until three centuries after that date.
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