Life
The son of a gardener, he was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, and entered the Church, in which he obtained many preferments, e.g. James I., in consideration of his “fine fancy and preaching,” made him one of the royal chaplains. In 1620 he became vicar of Stewkley, and in the same year was made dean of Christchurch, Oxford. He later became Bishop of Oxford (1628) and then Bishop of Norwich (1632).
Corbet was noted as a practical joker and considered rather scatter-brained. He was celebrated for his wit, which sometimes classed as buffoonery. Reportedly, he was to give a sermon before James I and was so entertained playing with a ring the King gave him that he forgot the sermon altogether.
He knew both John Donne and Ben Jonson. His poems, which are often mere doggerel, were not published until after his death. They include Journey to France, Iter Boreale, the account of a tour from Oxford to Newark, and the Farewell to the Fairies. He wrote numerous ballads, which he would also sing.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“I agree that we should work and prolong the functions of life as far as we can, and hope that Death may find me planting my cabbages, but indifferent to him and still more to the unfinished state of my garden.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a higher law than I.... I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The extrovert and introvert, the realist and idealist, the scientist and philosopher, the man who found himself by refinding his life history and the individual who discovered his being in fantasy, these are the differences between Freud and Jung.”
—Robert S. Steele. Freud and Jung: Conflicts of Interpretation, ch. 10, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1982)