ature for mental nutriment, his faculties, in their formation, were inlaid with the oddest varieties of opinions and crotchets. With vast learning, with a subtile and penetrating intellect, with a fancy singularly fruitful and ingenious, he still contrived to disconnect, more or less, his learning from what was worth learning, his intellect from what was reasonable, his fancy from what was beautiful. His poems, or rather his metrical problems, are obscure in thought, rugged in versification, and full of conceits which are intended to surprise rather than to please; but they still exhibit a power of intellect, both analytical and analogical, competent at once to separate the minutest and connect the remotest ideas. This power, while it might not have given his poems grace, sweetness, freshness, and melody, would still, if properly directed, have made them valuable for their thoughts; but in the case of Donne it is perverted to the production of what is bizarre or unnatural, and his muse is thus as hostile to use as to beauty. The intention is, not to idealize what is true, but to display the writer's skill and wit in giving a show of reason to what is false. The effect of this on the moral character of Donne was pernicious. A subtile intellectual scepticism, which weakened will, divorced thought from action and literature from life, and made existence a puzzle and a dream, resulted from this perversion of his intellect. He found that he could wittily justify what was vicious as well as what was unnatural; and his amatory poems, accordingly, are characterized by a cold, hard, labored, intellectualized sensuality, worse than the worst impurity of his contemporaries, because it has no excuse in passion for its violations of decency.

But now happened an event which proved how little the talents and accomplishments of this voluptuary of intellectual conceits were competent to serve him in a grapple with the realities of life. Lady Ellesmere had a niece, the daughter of Sir George Moore, with whom Donne fell in love; and as, ac

cording to Izaak Walton, his behavior, when it would entice, had "a strange kind of elegant, irresistible art," he induced her to consent to a private marriage, against the wishes and without the knowledge of her father. Izaak accounts for this, on the perhaps tenable ground, that "love is a flattering mischief, that hath denied aged and wise men a foresight of those evils that too often prove to be children of that blind father, a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers, and begets in us an unwearied industry to the attainment of what we desire." But Sir George Moore, the father of the lady, an arrogant, avaricious, and passionate brute, was so enraged at the match, that he did not rest until he had induced Lord Ellesmere to dismiss Donne from his service, and until he had placed his son-in-law in prison. Although Sir George, compelled to submit to what was inevitable, became at last reconciled to Donne, he refused to contribute anything towards his daughter's maintenance. As Donne's own fortune had been by this time all expended in travel, books, and other dissipation, and as he was deprived of his office, he was now stripped of everything but his power of framing conceits; and accordingly, in a dismal letter to his wife, recounting his miseries, he has nothing but this quibble to support her under affliction :

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During his residence with Sir Francis Wolly, Donne, whose acquirements in theology were immense, was offered a benefice by Dr. Morton, then Dean of Gloucester; but he declined to enter the Church from a feeling of spiritual unfitness. It is probable that his habits of intellectual self-indulgence, while they really weakened his conscience, made it morbidly acute. He would not adopt the profession of law or divinity for a subsistence, though he was willing to depend for subsistence on the charity of others. Izaak Walton praises his humility; but his humility was another name for his indisposition to or inability for practical labor, a humility which makes self-depreciation an excuse for moral laziness, and shrinks as vously from duty as from pride. Both law and divinity, therefore, he continued to make the luxuries of his existence.

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In good time this selfish intellectuality resulted in that worst of intellectual diseases, mental disgust. After the death of his patron, his father-in-law allowed him but £80 a year to support his family. Sickness, and affliction, and comparative poverty came to wake him from his dream, and reveal him to himself. In some affecting letters, which have been preserved, he moans over his moral inefficiency, and confesses to an "over-earnest desire for the next life" to escape from the perplexities of this. "I grow older," he says, "and not better; my strength diminisheth, and my load grows heavier; and yet I would fain be or do something; but that I cannot tell what is no wonder in this time of my sadness; for to choose is to do; but to be no part of anybody is as to be nothing and so I am, and shall so judge myself, unless I could be so incorporated into a part of the world as by business to contribute some sustenation to the whole. This I made account; I began early, when I undertook the study of our laws; but was diverted by leaving that, and embracing the worst voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of human learning and languages. . . . . Now I am become so

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little, or such a nothing, that I am not a subject good enough for one of my own letters. . . . I am rather a sickness or disease of the world than any part of it, and therefore neither love it nor life." And he closes with the words, "Your poor friend and God's poor patient, John Donne."

And this was the mental state to which Donne was reduced by thirty years of incessant study, ― of study that sought only the gratification of intellectual caprice and of intellectual curiosity, of study without a practical object. From this wretched mood of self-disgust and disgust with existence, this fret of thought at the impotence of will, we may date Donne's gradual emancipation from his besetting sins; for life, at such a point of spiritual experience, is only possible under the form of a new life. His theological studies and meditations were now probably directed more to the building up of character, and less to the pandering to his gluttonous intellectuality. His recovery was a work of years; and it is doubtful if he would ever have chosen a profession, if King James, delighted with his views regarding the questions of supremacy and allegiance, and amazed at his opulence in what then was called learning, had not insisted on his entering the Church. After much hesitation, and long preparation, Donne yielded to the royal command. He was successively made Chaplain in Ordinary, Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn, and Dean of St. Paul's; was soon recognized as one of the ablest and most eloquent preachers of his time; and impressed those who sat under his ministrations, not merely with admiration for his genius, but reverence for his holy life and almost ascetic self-denial. The profession he had adopted with so much self-distrust he came to love with such fervor that his expressed wish was to die in the pulpit, or in consequence of his labors therein. This last wish was granted in 1631, in his fifty-eighth year; "and that body," says Walton with quaint pathos, "which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost" now became

Donne's published sermons are in form nearly as grotesque as his poems, though they are characterized by profounder qualities of heart and mind. It was his misfortune to know thoroughly the works of fourteen hundred writers, most of them necessarily worthless; and he could not help displaying his erudition in his discourses. In what is now called taste he was absolutely deficient. His sermons are a curious mosaic of quaintness, quotation, wisdom, puerility, subtilty, and ecstasy. The pedant and the seer possess him by turns, and in reading no other divine are our transitions from yawning to rapture so swift and unexpected. He has passages of transcendent merit, passages which evince a spiritual vision so piercing, and a feeling of divine things so intense, that for the time we seem to be communing with a religious genius of the most exalted and exalting order; but soon he involves us in a maze of quotations and references, and our minds are hustled by what Hallam calls the rabble of bad authors" that this saint and sage has always at his skirts, even when he ascends to the highest heaven of contemplation. Doubtless what displeases this age added to his reputation in his own. Donne was more pedantic than his clerical contemporaries only because he had more of that thought-suffocating learning which all of them regarded with irrational respect. One of the signs of Bacon's superiority to his age was the cool audacity with which he treated sophists, simpletons, bigots, and liars, even though they wrote in Latin and Greek.

A poet as intellectual as Donne, but whose intelligence was united to more manliness and efficiency, was Sir John Davies. He was born in 1570, and was educated for the law. The first we bear of him, after being called to the bar, was his expulsion from the society of the Middle Temple, for quarrelling with one Richard Martin, and giving him a sound beating. This was in

biography was the publication, a year afterwards, of his poem on the Immortality of the Soul. A man who thus combined so much pugilistic with so much philosophic power, could not be long kept down in a country so full of fight and thought as England. He was soon restored to his profession, won the esteem both of Elizabeth and James, held high offices in Ireland, and in 1626 was appointed Chief Justice of England, but died of apoplexy before he was sworn in.

The two works on which his fame as a poet rests are on the widely different themes of Dancing and the Immortality of the Soul. The first is in the form of a dialogue between Penelope and one of her wooers, and most melodiously expresses "the antiquity and excellence of dancing." Only in the Elizabethan age could such a great effort of intellect, learning, and fancy have arisen from the trifling incident of asking a lady to dance. It was left unfinished; and, indeed, as it is the object of the wooer to prove to Penelope that dancing is the law of nature and life, the poem could have no other end than the exhaustion of the writer's ingenuity in devising subtile analogies for the wooer and answers as subtile from Penelope, who aids

"The music of her tongue With the sweet speech of her alluring eyes." To think logically from his premises was the necessity of Davies's mind. In the poem on Dancing the premises are fanciful; in the poem on the Immortality of the Soul the premises are real; but the reasoning in both is equally exact. It is usual among critics, even such critics as Hallam and Campbeli, to decide that the imaginative power of the poem on the Immortality of the Soul consists in the illustration of the arguments rather than in the perception of the premises. But the trutb would seem to be that the author exhibits his imagination more in his insight than in his imagery. The poetic excellence of the work comes from the power of clear, steady beholding of

spiritual facts with the spiritual eye,· of beholding them so clearly that the task of stating, illustrating, and reasoning from them is performed with masterly ease. In truth, the great writers of the time believed in the soul's immortality, because they were conscious of having souls; the height of their thinking was due to the fact that the soul was always in the premises, and thought, with them, included imaginative vision as well as dialectic skill. To a lower order of minds than Shakespeare, Hooker, and Bacon, than Chapman, Sidney, and Davies, proceed the theories of materialism, for no thinking from the soul can deny the soul's existence. It is curious to observe the advantage which Davies holds over his materialistic opponents, through the circumstance that, while his logical understanding is as well furnished as theirs, it reposes on central ideas and deep experiences which they either want or ignore. No adequate idea of the general gravity and grandeur of his thinking can be conveyed by short extracts; yet, opening the poem at the fourth section, devoted to the demonstration that the soul is a spirit, we will quote a few of his resounding quartrains in illustration of his manner:

"For she all natures under heaven doth pass,

Being like those spirits which God's face do see, Or like himself whose image once she was, Though now, alas! she scarce his shadow be.

"Were she a body, how could she remain

Within the body which is less than she?

Or how could she the world's great shape contain, And in our narrow breasts contained be?

"All bodies are confined within some place, But she all place within herself confines; All bodies have their measure and their space; But who can draw the soul's dimensive lines?" The next poet we shall mention was a link of connection between the age of Elizabeth and Cromwell; a contemporary equally of Shakespeare and Milton; a man whose first work was published ten years before Shakespeare had produced his greatest tragedies; and who, later in life, defended Episcopacy against Milton.

We of course

refer to Joseph Hall. He was born in 1574, was educated at Cambridge, and, VOL. XXII.-NO. 129. 3

in 1597, at the age of twenty-three, published his satires. Originally intended for the Church, he was now presented with a living by Sir Robert Drury, the munificent patron of Donne. He rose gradually to preferment, was made Bishop of Exeter in 1627, and translated to the see of Norwich in 1641. In 1643 he was deprived of his palace and revenue by the Parliamentary Committee of Sequestration, and died in 1656, in his eighty-second year. As a churchman, he was in favor of moderate measures, and he had the rare fortune to oppose Archbishop Laud, and to suffer under Oliver Cromwell.

As a satirist, if we reject the claim of Gascoigne to precedence, he was the earliest that English literature can boast. In his own words:

"I first adventure; follow me who list, And be the second English satirist." He had two qualifications for his chosen task,― penetrating observation and unshrinking courage. The follies and vices, the manners, prejudices, delusions, and crimes of his time, form the materials of his satires; and these he lashes or laughs at, according as the subject-matter provokes his indignation or his contempt. "Sith," he says in his Preface, "faults loathe nothing more than the light, and men love nothing more than their faults," it follows that "what with the nature of the faults, and the faults of the persons," it is impossible "that so violent an appeachment should be quietly brooked." But to those who are offended he vouchsafes but this curt and cutting defence of his plain speaking. "Art thou guilty? Complain not, thou art not wronged. Art thou guiltless? Complain not, thou art not touched." These satires, however, striking as they are for their compactness of language and vigor of characterization, convey but an inadequate idea of the depth, devoutness, and largeness of soul displayed in Hall's theological writings. His "Meditations," especially, have been read by thousands who never heard of him as a tart and caustic wit. But the one characteristic of sententiousness marks

equally the sarcasm of the youthful satirist and the raptures of the aged saint.

The next writer we shall consider, Sir Henry Wotton, possessed one of the most accomplished and enlightened minds of the age; though, unhappily for us, he has left few records of it in literature. He was born in 1568, educated at Oxford, and, leaving the university in his twenty-second year, passed nine years in travelling in Germany and Italy. On his return his conversation showed such wit and information, that it was said to be "one of the delights of mankind." He entered the service of the Earl of Essex, and, on the discovery of the Earl's treason, prudently escaped to the Continent. While in Italy he rendered a great service to the Scottish king; and James, on his accession to the English throne, knighted him, and sent him as ambassador to Venice. He remained abroad over twenty years. On his return he was made provost of Eton College. He died in 1639 in his seventy-first year.

Wotton is one of the few Englishmen who have succeeded in divesting themselves of English prejudices without at the same time divesting themselves of English virtues. He was a man of the world of the kind described by Bacon,a man "whose heart was not cut off from other men's lands, but a continent that joined to them." One of the ablest and most sagacious diplomatists that England ever sent abroad to match Italian craft with Saxon insight, he was at the same time chivalrous, loyal, and true. Though the author of the satirical definition of an ambassador, as "an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country," his own course was the opposite of falsehood. Indeed, he laid down this as an infallible aphorism to guide an English ambassador, that he should always tell the truth: first, because he will secure himself if called to account; second, because he will never be believed, and he will thus "put his adversaries, who will ever hunt counter, at a loss." One of his many accomplishments was the art in conversation of saying pointed things in pithy lan

guage. At Rome, a priest asked him, "Where was your religion before Luther?" To which Wotton answered, "My religion was to be found then where yours is not to be found now, in the written Word of God." He then put to the priest this' question: "Do you believe all those many thousands of poor Christians were damned, that were excommunicated because the Pope and the Duke of Venice could not agree about their temporal power, - even those poor Christians, that knew not why they quarrelled? Speak your conscience." The priest's reply was, "Monsieur, excuse me." Wotton's own Protestantism, however, did not consist, like that of too many others of his time and of ours, in hating Romanists. He was once asked "whether a papist may be saved." His answer was: "You may be saved without knowing that. Look to yourself." The spirit of this reply is of the inmost essence of toleration.

Cowley, in his elegy on Wotton, has touched happily on those felicities of his nature and culture which made him so admired by his contemporaries: "What shall we say, since silent now is he, Who, when he spoke, all things would silent be? Who had so many languages in store, That only fame shall speak of him in more. Whom England, now no more returned, must see; He's gone to heaven on his fourth embassy.

So well he understood the most and best
Of tongues, that Babel sent into the west,
Spoke them so truly, that he had, you'd swear,
Not only lived but been born everywhere.

Nor ought the language of that man be less,
Who in his breast had all things to express."

As a poet Sir Henry Wotton is universally known by one exquisite little poem, "The Character of a Happy Life," which is in all hymn-books. The general drift of his poetry is to expose the hollowness of all the objects to which as a statesman and courtier the greater portion of his own life was devoted. His verses are texts for discourses, uniting economy of words with fulness of thought and sentiment. His celebrated epitaph on a married couple is condensed to the point of converting feeling into wit: