In 1839 Mr. Herbert commenced in the New-York _Turf Register_ a series of papers, under the signature of "Frank Forester," from which have grown _My Shooting Box, The Warwick Woodlands, Field Sports of the United States and British Provinces_, and _Fish and Fishing in the United States and British Provinces_--works which by the general consent of the sporting world are second to none in their department, in any of the qualities which should distinguish this sort of writing. The principal distinction between these and all other sporting works lies in this, that such works in general treat only of game in the field and flood, and the modes of killing it, while these are in great part natural histories, containing minute and carefully digested accounts of every specie of game, beast, bird, and fish, compiled from Audubon, Wilson, Giraud, Godman, Agassiz, De Kay, and other authorities, besides long disquisitions into their habits, times of migration, breeding, &c., from the personal observation and experience of the author. Any person is at once enabled by them to distinguish between any two even closely allied species, and to adopt the proper nomenclature, with a knowledge of the reason for it. The sporting precepts are admitted, throughout the western country especially, to be superior to all others, as well as the papers relating to the breaking and the kennel and field management of dogs, &c. The same may be said of what he has written of guns and gunnery. Mr. Herbert has hunted, shot, and fished during the last twenty years in every state of the Union, from Maine to Maryland, south of the great lakes, and from below Quebec to the Sault St. Marie northward of them. Not having visited the southern or south western states, the accounts of sporting in those regions are collected from the writings or oral communications of their best sportsmen, and on these points much valuable new information, especially as to the prairie shooting and the sports of the Rocky Mountains, will be contained in the new edition of the _Field Sports_ to appear in the coming autumn.
Besides his contributions to romantic and sporting literature, Mr. Herbert has written largely in criticism, he has done much as a poet, and his capacities in classical scholarship have been illustrated by some of the finest examples of Greek and Latin translation that have appeared in our time. In the aggregate his works would now make scarcely less than fifty octavo volumes.