man of New York, a literary friend, for the purpose of acting as groomsman at the marriage of his friend and the lady in question. With the variableness of a woman, Miss Barker made a bridegroom of the groomsman, and cast an enduring shadow over the life of her former suitor. The only child by this wife was a son, now living in England, at the age of eighteen. Mrs. Herbert died in 1846.
In February of 1858, Herbert married a lady from Providence, R. I., after a brief and romantic acquaintance. His affection for her seems to have been unbounded; but—whether on account of habits long ago contracted, or in consequence of the slanders of meddlesome neighbors, the world does not know, and has no right to inquire—she left him; and he, broken down by this last great sorrow of a life of sorrows, committed suicide at the Stevens House in New York, on the 17th day of April, 1858. He was buried in the cemetery adjoining his place, "the Cedars," near Newark, N. J.
The character of Herbert is a difficult one to criticize; but it is very certain that his intellectual attainments, his great love for everything in nature, and his power of communicating that love to his readers, by far outweigh in importance his faults, which were those of the head and not of the heart. In no line that he ever wrote is there an improper tendency, or the expression of an impure thought. Judged by his works, he appears preeminently a good man. Judged by what is known of his life, he appears to have been prevented only by faults which were the inheritance of a misspent youth, from becoming a bright example of combined greatness and goodness.
