James Hervey, author of “Meditations among the Tombs,” was born at Hardingstone, near Northampton, on 26th February 1714. The facts of his life are few. He was educated at Northampton and Lincoln College, Oxford, and was first curate and afterwards incumbent of Weston-Favel and Collingtree, both near Northampton. He died on Christmas-day 1758. Hervey adopted a Calvinistic creed, and in the 18th century his works, though not distinguished by any extraordinary qualities, enjoyed great favour with the people. The best of them are “Meditations and Contemplations” (1746), including his most famous production, “Meditations among the Tombs,” and also “Reflections on a Flower Garden” and “A Descant on Creation;” “Contemplations on the Night and Starry Heavens” (1747); and “Theron and Aspasio, or a Series of Dialogues and Letters on the Most Important Subjects” (3 vols. 1755). This last gave rise to the Sandemanian controversy as to the nature of saving faith. A complete edition of his works, with a memoir, appeared in 1797. See also his Life and Letters (2 vols. 1760).

Personal

  A more gentle, pious, unworldly spirit than that of James Hervey it is difficult to conceive. He was never known to be in a passion; he made a solemn vow to dedicate all the profits of his literary work to pious and charitable uses, and scrupulously performed it. He was naturally disinclined to controversy, though from a sense of duty he threw himself into the hottest and most unsatisfactory of all controversies. The simplicity of his character is a strange contrast to the artificiality of his best-known writings; but in his correspondence and his sermons he uses a simpler and therefore more pleasing style. His popularity as a writer never led him to take a false view of his own powers; when it was at its height he frankly confessed that he was not a man of strong mind, and that he had not power for arduous researches.

General

  Have you met with two little volumes which contain four contemplations written by a Mr. James Hervey, a young Cornish or Devonshire clergyman? The subjects are upon walking upon the tombs, upon a flower-garden, upon night, and upon the starry heavens. There is something poetical and truly pious in them.

  He wished to have more books, and, upon inquiring if there were any in the house, was told that a waiter had some, which were brought to him; but I recollect none of them, except Hervey’s “Meditations.” He thought slightingly of this admirable book. He treated it with ridicule, and would not allow even the scene of the dying Husband and Father to be pathetick. I am not an impartial judge; for Hervey’s “Meditations” engaged my affections in my early years. He read a passage concerning the moon, ludicrously, and shewed how easily he could, in the same style, make reflections on that planet, the very reverse of Hervey’s representing her as treacherous to mankind. He did this with much humour; but I have not preserved the particulars.

  Among serious readers, the estimate of their most excellent author, on points far more important than those that relate to the art of authorship, has been, and will ever remain, invariable. There can be very few individuals, whose opinion would be worth hearing, that will not speak with delight of his exalted piety, of his zeal for such views of the Christian religion as animated our venerable and heroic reformers, and the worthiest of their successors, and of the exemplary purity of his life. In addition to this, his writings manifest an understanding of a respectable order; and have been exceeded, we believe, by very few books in extent of beneficial influence. His “Meditations,” especially, have contributed more, it is probable, than any other book, to the valuable object of prompting and guiding serious minds, of not the superior rank in point of taste, to draw materials of devotional thought from the scenery of nature. An immense number of persons, have been taught by him, to contemplate vicissitude and phænomena of the seasons, the flowers of the earth, and the stars of heaven, with such pious and salutary associations, as would not otherwise have been suggested to their minds: and the value of these associations is incalculable, on the double ground of enlargement of thought, and devotional tendency. Hervey ranks, therefore, among the high benefactors of his age.—But in turning to the more strictly literary estimate of his writings, there is no averting the heavy charges which critics, without one dissenting voice, bring against his style. No one qualified in the smallest degree to judge of good writing, ever attempts to controvert the justice with which they pronounce that style artificial, timid, and gaudy, loaded with an inanimate mass of epithets, and in short, very fine, without being at all rich.

  The bloated style and peculiar rhythm of Hervey, which is poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic, from its utter unfitness for poetry.

  The author of “The Doctor” says that some styles are flowery, but that the Meditationist’s is a weedy style; alluding, I suppose, to its luxuriant commonplace, and vulgar showiness, as of corn-poppies and wild mustard. But Hervey seems to have been a simple earnest clergyman, with his heart in his parish.

  Hervey’s “Meditations” (1746–7), for example, was one of the most popular books of the century; and it bears to Shaftesbury the same kind of relation which Young bears to Pope. Hervey was an attached disciple of Wesley; and a man of some cultivation and great fluency of speech. He tried to eclipse the worldly writers in their own style of rhetoric. The worship of nature might be combined with the worship of Jehovah. He admires the “stupendous orbs,” and the immortal harmonies, but he takes care to remember that we must die, and mediates, in most edifying terms, amongst the tombs. Such works can hardly be judged by the common literary canons. Writings which are meant to sanctify imaginative indulgences by wresting the ordinary language to purposes of religious edification are often, for obvious reasons, popular beyond their merits. Sacred poetry and religious novels belong to a world of their own. To the profane reader, however, the fusion of deistical sentiment and evangelical truth does not seem to have thoroughly effected. There is the old falsetto note which affects us disagreeably in Shaftesbury’s writings. Hervey, after all, lives in the eighteenth century, and though as his “Theron and Aspasia” proves, he could write with sufficient savour upon the true Evangelical dogmas, the imaginative symbolism of his creed is softened by the contemporary currents which blend with it.