Drury's scholarship is old school in all the best ways. He goes to archival material, unpicks palimpsests, brings experience to bear, and shares his findings with generosity and evident love for his subject. At times the structure is a little awkward to assimilate from the reader's point of view, yet forgiveable when taken as the hazard not only of marrying the scholarly with the commercial but also drawing the life out of the poetry, particularly when exact dates of poetical composition are hard to come by.

Key poems are used to illustrate certain stages in Herbert's development; by and large this approach works as a way of containing the linear life and cyclical rhythm of the Christian year. Drury notes that Herbert's life "had ‘a double motion'. He lived an ordinary life, a public life going ‘straight' through time and with it. Simultaneously, he lived an inner or hidden life, obliquely set on his ‘Master', Christ who was ‘on high'." Lest the word Christ scare anyone off, Drury adds: "Put in less specifically religious terms, this is about everybody's preoccupation with getting through the day as best one can, while at the same time having an ‘eye' to the overall parabola of one's destiny, of what one would ideally hope to be." One can't help having an eye to the overall parabola of Britain's cultural destiny.