How to Lose: Lessons from George Herbert

There is a popular story about George Herbert, seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman and poet. A skilled and genteel lutist, he set off one evening from the parish of Bemerton to play music with friends near the Salisbury Cathedral. On the way he encountered “a poor man with a poorer horse,” as his biographer Izaak Walton editorializes, that had collapsed under the weight of the load it carried. Herbert helped the man unload and reload the horse, even giving him money for lodgings and refreshment, admonishing the man “that if he loved himself he should be merciful to his beast.”