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Well proven numerical techniques of analysis have been used to study the manner in which piled foundations deform under working loads. It has been assumed that the soil surrounding the piles may be characterised by suitably chosen elastic constants. This assumption has enabled simple models of the behaviour of single piles under the action of vertical and horizontal loads, to be established; the models have led to more efficient and economic methods of estimating the likely deformation of working piles, and an improved understanding of the manner in which load is transferred from pile to soil. The mode ls for the behaviour of single piles have been extended for the analysis of pile groups by studying the deformation patterns in the soil around a loaded pile. The solutions developed have been extensively checked to ensure that they agree with the results of more sophisticated, computer oriented analyses, and also that they are consistent with the results of model and full-scale pile tests. An attempt has been made, towards the end of the thesis, to estimate the disturbance due to the installation of a pile, particularly as regards the generation of excess pore pressures and the subsequent consolidation.

From his earliest poems George Herbert demonstrates a desire to cast his relationship to God in terms of a loving relationship. Scholars have long recognized the significance of love in Herbert's poetry, but they have tended to focus their discussions either on love as a theological idea or as a literary convention. In both cases, the experience of love as a personal expression of cultural values has been neglected. Taking these respective approaches as a point of departure, this dissertation argues that the theological and the courtly experience of love represent Herbert's attempts to negotiate the terms of his subjectivity in a loving relationship with his God. The first part of this study (The Habit of Mind) views Herbert's experience of subjectivity in a theological context. Synthesizing the on-going debate concerning Herbert's Anglo-Catholic or Reformed Protestant leanings, it characterizes Herbert's experience of divine love as an ambivalent one. His use of both caritas (Anglo-Catholic) and agape (Reformed Protestant) figures suggests that his desire to love God is met with the anxiety that this very desire subverts the loving relationship. The subsequent spiral of desire and anxiety leads to a schizophrenic double motion, or, a performance and remonstrance of self. The second part (The Sexual Drama of the Devout Soul's Salvation) finds this same double motion in Herbert's accommodations of theological to sexual love. Where the conventions of courtly love are invoked, God as love dictates that Herbert play the woman's part by symbolically emasculating or cross-dresses his will. And yet, by rhetorically cross-dressing Herbert is aware that he also presents himself as a version of the monstrous hermaphrodite--the womanish man. The risk of sexual transgression embodied in the hermaphrodite adds to his anxiety about performance, causing Herbert to recoil from the very role he desires to play. Manipulating gender, like desire in the theological context, Herbert both recuperates and threatens his spiritual condition.