was a wild dreamer, and saw apparitions. He had imaginary conflicts with Satan, during which he fortified himself with quotations from Scripture. Satius est supervacua discere quam nihil. A superfluity of knowledge is better than noodledom. The intense thirst for knowledge which distinguished Donne and the other metaphysical poets served at least one purpose, if it did not improve their verses. It elevated them above the follies and meannesses of the idle Court butterflies, it kept their blood cool and sober, and it taught one or two of them to meditate divinely on themes beyond the sunset. They busied their brains with book-lore, they lived exemplary lives, and they left poems which are often unintelligible.

Donne was at this time a great favourite with King James, who knew him personally. It was the custom of his Majesty to gather around him at dinner a goodly assemblage of courtiers, wits, and churchmen, and to enter with spirit into the discussion of the various topics broached by the company. To these social meetings Donne was often invited, and he made a most favourable impression by the unpretending cleverness of his conversation. The king had several conversations with Donne relative to the quæstio rerata of the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, and so pleased was he with Donne's observations, that he requested him to answer in a book the reasons urged against those oaths. The result appeared in 1610, in the shape of the Pseudo-Martyr, a vigorous treatise against Popery. James was delighted. Donne had previously sought secular employment; but nothing would satisfy Majesty but his entrance into the Church. "I know Mr. Donne is a learned man, has the abilities of a learned divine, and will prove a powerful preacher; and my desire is to prefer him that way, and in that way I will deny you nothing for him." Thus King James. Donne resisted the proposal for three years, during which he studied deeply in divinity, and in the dead languages. At length he was ordained by his friend King, Bishop of London. "He was now gladder to be a door-keeper in the house of God," he said, "than he could be to enjoy the noblest of all temporal employments." But he was modest and diffident withal. It is amusing to be told that he preached his earliest sermons privately, a few miles out of London; his first being preached at Paddington, then a village. Then his Majesty bade him preach before him at Whitehall, and he did so with extraordinary success, speeching it "like an angel from a cloud, but in none." Honours showered thick upon him, like Oppien's tigers, born from the breath of the wind. James made him his chaplain in ordinary. Accompanying James to Cambridge, in the usual royal "progress," he was, on the recommendation of his royal patron, made Doctor of Divinity in that University. Shortly after his return from Cambridge, Anne, his beloved wife, died, leaving him a widower with seven children. The shock was almost too much for his intellect. It seemed hard to lose so easily one so dearly bought; and he shut himself up in his room for some days and nights, struggling with his grief, and calling on heaven for mercy. "Now his very soul was elemented

of nothing but sadness. Now grief took so full a possession of his heart, as to leave no place for joy." Anne was buried in the churchyard of St. Clement's, near Temple Bar. The first sermon he preached after her death was in St. Clement's Church, and his text was, "Lo, I am the man that has seen affliction." Walton went to hear this sermon; most of the congregation were moved to tears, and I am sure that the eyes of the honest old angler were not dry. From this time, Donne was an altered man. Death, "which skips none, and surprises many" (as Wollaston has it), came upon him with a suddenness which decomposed his little system of stoical philosophy. The rest of his days were distinguished by an utter abnegation of worldly cares and vanities.

He was now chosen preacher of the Society of Lincoln's Inn. Two years afterwards, he was commanded by the king to attend the Earl of Doncaster in his embassy to Germany. This appointment was regarded with great pleasure by his near friends, who hoped that travel might dissipate the clouds with which sorrow for his wife's death and immoderate study had enveloped his heart and mind. Fourteen months afterwards he returned, much improved in bodily health, and laboriously devoted himself to his duties as a preacher. In 1621, King James presented him with the Deanery of St. Paul's. Shortly after he became Dean, the Earl of Kent gave him a benefice, and the Earl of Dorset presented him with the Vicarage of St. Dunstan in the West. He was totally and finally freed from pressing pecuniary cares. Several other appointments followed; and he fulfilled them all with an industry and a piety which won for him the love and admiration of the great body of the English clergy.

So Donne's preaching, from a worldly point of view, was better than Jonson's play-writing. Ben was always in difficulties, always in want of funds to purchase Canary. He had become laureate, with a salary of one hundred marks per annum; but his petition, requesting that the marks should be changed into pounds, was not yet granted. Nor had King Charles added to the one hundred pounds the yearly gift of a tierce of Spanish Canary out of the cellars at Whitehall. Once or twice the laureate and Donne shook hands; but Donne never believed, with the owner of the "mountain belly" and "rocky face," that "wine it is the milk of Venus." It seems to me, that King James had a sharp eye to recognise personal merit. His shrewd Scotch head could hardly fail to censure the follies of a man who had pinked a companion in a duel, libelled the Scots in Eastward Hoe, and who, if the story be true, said to his Majesty's successor, when Charles sent him ten guineas: "His Majesty has sent me ten guineas, because I am poor and live in an alley; go and tell his Majesty that his soul lives in an alley." James, however, was not only capable of perceiving Donne's merits, but he was also shrewd enough to perceive that Donne might prove a powerful prop to him in his fight for popularity. It was now and then maliciously whispered in some of the pulpits that James still leant in secret to the Romish faith, and that he was desirous of favouring the political prospects of the Roman Catho

lic party. On one occasion, some busy-body told the king that even honest John Donne had been circulating these whispers, and from the influential pulpit of St. Paul's. The king was in an agony of mingled doubt and rage. He sent for the Dean, and told him of the rumour. The answer, dignified as it was, was more than satisfactory, and the king confessed, that "he was right glad he rested no longer under the suspicion." The Dean knelt down: "I desire that I may not rise," he said, until, as in like cases I always have from God, I may have from your Majesty some assurance that I stand clear and fair in your opinion." Whereupon the king raised the subject to his feet. "I believe you!" cried James with fervour; "I know that you are an honest man, and doubt not but that you love me truly." I tell this story on the authority of worthy Mr. Isaak Walton, who adored orthodoxy, loved gossip, and had a sharp eye for the shallows in a clear stream.

In his fifty-fourth year he fell dangerously ill, and it was feared that he would die of a decline. The illness, which lasted some time, did not long interfere with his clerical duties. In his brave pursuit of holiness, nothing daunted him. In a few days he was again at work. He rose at four in the morning, and retired to rest at eleven in the evening. When he was not preaching, he was studying or performing offices of charity. He invariably committed his sermons to memory; and Saturday, I am told, was his only day of relaxation. He was not a rich man, far from it; but "Charity, that milky-bosom'd woman," taught him how to make the most of his means. He gave liberally to poor scholars whom Fortune prevented from prosecuting their studies completely. He walked the prisons, looking after the wants of the prisoners; and he constantly freed poor debtors, by paying their debts out of his private pocket. He became the chief stay and comfort of his father-in-law, Sir George Moore, and he maintained his own mother, who died in his house only six months before him. The old lady still clung to the bosom of the Romish Church; but he was much too good a son and too liberal a clergyman to attempt her conversion. In the August of 1630, while residing in the house of Mrs. Harvey, his eldest daughter, at Abury-Hatch, in Essex, he caught a fever, from the effects of which he never wholly recovered. He was almost bedridden for several months. Being appointed to preach, according to his custom, on the first Friday in Lent, he hurried up to London some days before the appointed time. Against the advice of all his friends, who perceived his dangerous condition, he resolved to preach the Lent sermon, "professing an holy ambition to perform that sacred work." "When, to the amazement of some beholders, he appeared in the pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself, not to preach mortification by a living voice, but mortality by a decayed body and a dying face." His text was, "To God the Lord belong the issues from death." And "many that then saw his tears, and heard his faint and hollow voice, professed they thought the text prophetically chosen, and that Dr. Donne had preached his own funeral sermon." The exertion was far

too much for his wasted strength. The next day he was unable to move about.

I for one cannot censure the pardonable pride which made Donne, some days before his dissolution, agree to the proposal of Dr. Fox, his physician, that he should have a monument made for him. He was ever humble and magnanimous, and his assent was given in no spirit of petty vanity. Be that as it may, Donne ordered a carver to cut for him the figure of an urn, rather higher than his body, and a board of about his own height. He then called in the aid of a painter, who, was to paint his effigy on the board. Charcoal fires being lit in his study, he was carried thither. He then put off his clothes, had his winding-sheet put on him, "and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, to be shrouded and put into their coffin or grave." Thus attired, he stood against the urn, simulating death, with his eyes shut, and the sheet turned aside to reveal his worn and fleshless face. In this position he was drawn by the painter. When the picture was finished it was set by his bedside, where he kept it till death, to remind him of mortality. It was afterwards carved in one entire piece of white marble, which (Dugdale says) is still to be seen in St. Paul's Church. He lay for fifteen days, hourly expecting death. He died on the 31st of March 1631, and was buried in St. Paul's Church. A large assemblage of eminent persons met at his grave on that day. All that remains of his mortal features now is the statue on the monument. "It seems to breathe faintly," said his good friend Sir Henry Wotton; "and posterity shall look upon it as a kind of artificial miracle."

"The metaphysical poets were men of learning," says Johnson in one of his just fits; "and to show their learning was their whole endeavour; but, unluckily, resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry, they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect, that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables." This is as true as any criticism Johnson ever penned; still, like all his criticisms, it is only half true. The metaphysical poets were for the most part men of genius as well as learning; and their whole endeavour was not so much to show their learning, as to gratify their love for quaint fancies. The form was in their eyes so subservient to the substance, that they neglected the form of their poems altogether; yet they now and then touch a key-note of melody which has a deeper and more lingering effect than the music of the more finished verse-writers. They were addicted to what Dryden calls "the fairy kind of writing." They lost sight of nature while racking their learned heads for queer images. Their pictures, though essentially poetical, were proportionally false; yet they limned them with an honest desire to benefit their fellow mortals. They paint at second-hand, taking as models those vague hypothetical memories which, through a long sojourn in the domains of the fancy, have been distorted into a picturesqueness not their own. They are lavish of meta

phor, generally far fetched, but seldom more than pretty. All these faults were most prominent in their love-verses,-a kind of composition which ought to be peculiarly free from such affectations. But, you see, ever since Queen Elizabeth (whom Mr. Froude has, on the no-evidence of a Spanish prelate, just turned traitor to) taught her maids of honour to study Greek, in which language she herself was a proficient,-ever since Queen Elizabeth had studied Plato, and grown jealous of Amy Robsart,— the fine ladies had become very learned and clever. The poets, therefore, saddled their Pegasi, placed their mistresses on the crupper, and, to the astonishment of worthy burghers, who could not read Marino, galloped away into the cloudland of metaphysics. It is rather amusing to see these clever scholars cutting Cupid's bowstring into infinitesimal conceits, and hashing the whole up into philosophical mince-meat. Ifa fly flew into your sweetheart's eye, reader, what could you say on the subject? Nothing, I suppose; yet the metaphysicians were at no loss. They would tell you that the fly, after winging about in the sun for some time, was attracted by a still brighter luminary,—an eye so bright that it made the sun appear a shadow; that, flying about cheek and lip, it sucked thence such sweets as converted it into a bird of paradise; that, phaeton-like, it flew into her eye at last, was scorched in flames; and that, when it fell, a tear fell with it, which tear straightway changed into a pearl in which the poor fly was embalmed! If your sweetheart sang to you, would you swear that, listening to her voice, the wind ceased, the panther became tame, the rugged rocks were dissolved to tears; and further, that, because she frowned while singing, the melted rocks were frozen to stone again by her disdain? This was rather conceit than metaphysics; but it is impossible to illustrate the more characteristic writing, save by quotation. Only let me state here, that under all this affectation, all this false ornament, and all this absurdity, there lay in the verses of these poets a vein of deeper and profounder meaning than many give them credit for. Once make yourself master of their involved diction, once crack the kernel of their quaint inverted style, and you will arrive at a clearer perception of their real merits. One has to grope about some time before he finds the silken clue which leads the true lover to their Rosamond's bower; but when he has caught the clue, and followed it boldly, ten to one he will be brought face to face with a blushing beauty, powerful to soften the heart of the sternest critical Eleanor that ever raised dagger and poisoned bowl. The best of the poets I speak of erred almost unconsciously. You must approach them with no timorous and mincing tread, if you desire to touch their depths. Don't stand shivering on the brink of beauty. There is Hippocrene; no shallow and noisy stream in which you can see the pebbles glistening, but a deep quiet pool,-so deep as to be almost without music,-so deep that you cannot catch a glimpse of the bottom. What then?-what then? Off with your straight laces, and plunge in head foremost. You will not only find the good old English bath refreshing, but if you are an expert diver in such waters, you may bring up