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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MEMORIAL-INTRODUCTION. If the head of the House of Spenser, in his generation, was wisely advised to regard the name of Edmund Spenser in the roll of an illustrious ancestry as ' the richest jewel of his coronet;' and if to-day one is glad to find an Earl Spencer eager to accept the (possible) lineage, and covetous to spell with an ' s' rather than a ' c, '?equally is it the 'gloir' of the families of Powis and Pembroke to be able ?and perhaps more certainly?to inscribe in their descents the name of George Herbert. The late lamented Sidney Herbert, Lord Herbert of Lea, father of the present Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, showed his sense of the honour by public speech and many a beautiful letter when he sought to enlist friends, far and near?and splendidly succeeded?in the erection of a Church at Bemerton, in memorial of George Herbert, ?his boast of being a Sidney melting into a yearning and wistful gratitude that he was also a Herbert of the George Herbert stock; while the present scholarly Earl Powis?and hence our Dedication, which mere rank never should have won?has given various proofs of his sympathetic estimate of the same kinship. Our genealogical researches have revealed to us others high-placed and noticeable intrinsically, who claim the 'blood' of George Herbert, and hold it as an inestimable possession. Turning to the elaborate ' Ten Tables' of Pedigrees of the 'noble family of Herbert' prefixed by Earl Powis to his private edition of Lord Herbert of Cherbury's ' Expedition to the Isle of Rhe' (contributed to the Philo- biblon Society, 1860, 4to), the first begins with Charlemagne and Hildegardis, daughter of Childebrand, Duke of Swabia; passes to Pipin and Bernard, kings of Italy (a.d. 810, 818), to Herberts Counts de Vermandois; and ends in Sir Willia...
