Report on a lecture given at Trinity College, Parkville on the 12 th of August and reflections from Philip Harvey, for the pew notes of St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne Last Tuesday Susan Bell, Bishop of Niagara, gave the Barry Marshall Lecture in Melbourne on the priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633). Priest and poet are roles inextricably bound together in the person of Herbert, something she painfully (in the early modern sense of ‘going to pains’) described. She remarked that “all his writing is about vocation to Christianity.” Son of one of the leading families of the realm, u niversity orator, courtier and diplomat, he was “a man on the way up when it all came to a screeching halt.” Herbert decided to enter holy orders, possibly due to health. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, went to work in the small parish of Bemerton near Salisbury, where presently he died, probably of consumption. His poetry, Bishop Bell called it “winsome”...