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, 66 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. If a 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

some of the jewels good men left there for your benefit two or three hundred years ago. To pursue the metaphor, you may, if you please, place the jewels in your own setting, sell them as your own at modern value, and very few (with the exception of such ancient jewellers as myself) will be able to detect you in the theft.

You must not confound Donne and his imitators with that other metaphysical school of which Sir John Davies was the author. Davies was an eminent lawyer in the time of King James, who admired him much; besides being successively solicitor and attorney-general, he sat for some years in the House of Commons as the representative of Corse Castle, in Dorsetshire. He not only wrote twenty-six acrostics on the name of Elizabeth, which were published under the title of Hymns to Astrea, and which, according to Ellis, "are probably the best acrostics ever written," but he was also the author of Orchestra, a poem on dancing. His great work, however, was the Nosce Teipsum, a philosophical poem in ten-syllable verses, disposed in quatrains, similar in form to Sir Thomas Overbury's Wife and Will Davenant's Gondifert. Nosce Teipsum is the earliest poem of the kind in the language. It treats of human knowledge, of the soul of man, and the immortality thereof. The quatrains resemble the Maxims of Rochefoucault. Davies expressed nice simple philosophy in melodious and elegant language. He is never deep, but he is always readable, and his style is wonderfully well sustained. His great poem is rather superior to that portion of the Mirror for Magistrates which the vigorous pen of Thomas Sackville did not endeavour to immortalise.

Dryden, who went deep into the Elizabethan gold-mines, styles Donne "the greatest wit, but not the greatest poet, in our language," -praise, which would hold truer in Dryden's time than it possibly can in the present day. At all events, Donne is the first of his class in point of merit, as well as in point of time. He is deeper, profounder, and more original than any of his imitators. He is never shallow, as Cowley often is; and he has more common sense than Cowley. Besides his poems, he wrote the Pseudo Martyr, to which I have already alluded, a folio volume of sermons, and a quaint performance entitled Biathanatos, which is a refutation of the common notion that suicide is necessarily sinful.

Donne's prose is fully as involved and metaphysical as his poetry. There is some powerful argumentative writing in his book against Popery; and in his sermons, amid much that is finical and pedantic, we come upon ideas and expressions which have the brilliance of the genuine gold. We have it on excellent authority, that Donne was a successful preacher; but such a preacher would be unintelligible nowadays. In those times, the best intellects not only flocked into the Church, but they almost invariably did so; and such a galaxy of gifted divines as ornamented the reigns of Elizabeth and James, has not been seen since Laud promulgated his great system of Thorough. To the bosom

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of the orthodox English Church, clung clusters of gifted poets and philosophers. So the Church prospered, and the gifted gentleman got fat capons, in the shape of livings, spiced with tasty little benefices.

Donne was the second man to write English satire proper. Bishop Hall made the first attempt in his Virgilemiarum, or bundle of rods, which was published in 1597:

"I first adventure, follow me who list,

And be the second English satirist."

The French had already given birth to Regnier, the Italians to Ariosto; but Hall's chief models were the Roman satirists, Juvenal and Persius in particular. Donne followed with verses less musical, but far more vigorous and fuller of good character-painting. He lashed the vices of society and the Court, and literary charlatans. It is difficult to select from the satires passages which are both good and unobjectionable; for Donne fell into the common vice of his time, and sometimes wrote indecently. Here is part of the summing-up of the third satire, in which he has satirised the Roman Catholic, the Genevese, the non-believer, and even the English churchman, in their search for true religion; and it will presently be seen what meaning he had in so doing.

"Though Truth and Falsehood be

Near twins, yet Truth a little older is:

Be busie to seeke her; believe me this,

He's not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.
T'adore or scorn an image, or protest,

May all be bad. Doubt wisely. In strange way
To stand enquiring right is not to stray;

To sleep or run wrong is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands."

I am very glad indeed that Donne wrote satires, and am sorry that he did not abstain from writing epigrams. The epigram should have the flash of the sunstroke, and strike its subject down at a blow. His mind had not sufficient velocity for this species of composition. But his best things are his shorter poems. In them, I find genuine poetry, real inspiration. The following conceit is better (to my thinking) than all the epigrams that were ever penned, save those of Theocritus, which I like because, instead of being adders with stings, they are cabinets of pastoral sweets:

"CANONIZATION.

For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love,

Or chide my palsy or my gout,

My five gray hairs or ruined fortunes flout;

With wealth your state, your minds with art improve.

Take you a course, get you a place,

Observe his Honour or his Grace,

Or the King's real or his stamped face
Contemplate. What you will, approve,
So you will let me love.

We can die by it, if not live by Love.
And if unfit for tomb or hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,