Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past; wit that might warrant be For the whole city to talk foolishly Till that were cancell'd; and when that was gone, We left an air behind us, which alone Was able to make the two next companies Right witty; though but downright fools, mere wise ! 17 How, above all, could it spare the reverie in Westminster Abbey ! Mortality, behold, and fear, What a change of flesh is here! Here they lie, had realms and lands, Who now want strength to stir their hands; Where from their pulpits seal'd with dust, They preach, In greatness is no trust!' With the richest, royal'st seed, That the earth did e'er suck in Since the first man died for sin; Here the bones of birth have cried, Though gods they were, as men they died; ' Here are sands, ignoble things Dropt from the ruin'd sides of kings. Here's a world of pomp and state Buried in dust, once dead by fate! 18 It is one of the many strange transformation scenes in poetical history. Suddenly, as we weary over a painful elegy on Lady Rutland, or fret at the petty whimsicalities of an amour with a dead mistress in her grass-green mantle of the grave, a veil seems to have been withdrawn, and the true man to appear-a fit companion for John Fletcher! The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. George Darley. Two vols. E. Moxon, 1840. 1 The Faithful Shepherdess, Act v, Sc. 5. 2 The Maid's Tragedy, Act ii, Sc. 1. The Queen of Corinth, Act iii, Sc. 2. The Nice Valour; or, the Passionate Madman, Act iii, Sc. 3. 5 The Faithful Shepherdess, Act i,. Sc. 1. 6 Ibid., Act iii, Sc. 1. Ibid., Act i, Sc. 2. 7 Ibid., Act iv, Sc. 2. The Mad Lover: Act v, Sc. 1. 10 The Loyal Subject, Act iii, Sc. 5. 11 The Beggar's Bush, Act ii, Sc. 1. 12 The Lovers' Progress, Act iii, Sc. 5. 13 The Elder Brother, Act iii, Sc. 5. 14 The Bloody Brother, Act iv, Sc. 2. 15 The Captain, Act ii, Sc. 2. 16 An Elegy on the Death of the Countess of Rutland. 17 Mr. Francis Beaumont's Letter to Ben Jonson, vol. ii, p. 710. 18 On the Tombs in Westminster Abbey. DR. JOHN DONNE 1573-1631 A STRANGE career, a strange nature! Heir to a saving London merchant. Brought up a Roman Catholic. Comrade of Essex and Ralegh in the famous dare-devil raid upon Cadiz, and in the less fortunate Islands Voyage. Beloved of stately, charming Countesses, and other ladies many, with more of charm and less of stateliness. Shining at Courts foreign and English. Revelling at taverns with Ben Jonson and the players, as wild a wit as the wildest. A born rebel against convention, and its slave. According to Izaak Walton, by the time he was twenty, to Jonson, by twenty-five, in the front rank of poets, admirable alike for skill and for audacity. Baring his heart in its nakedness, which was 'le tout', by voice and pen to earn his circle's applause. Never, during his singing season, condescending to print, which would have brought the public renown he despised. Scattering among love ditties insolently amorous, angelic hymns, not rarely unangelically besmirched. Then suddenly-priest, preacher, theologian, dignitary, moralist, faithful husband, -a theme, cheek by jowl with meek, profound Hooker, courtly and saintly Herbert, decorous, dexterous, and diplomatic Wotton, for the seventeenth-century chastened Boswell; his Muse sulky, because forbidden to be proterva, productive of none but an occasional, perhaps apocryphal, psalm; yet, it may be, hard tasked at times to scowl down a protesting sigh after the naughty praedecanal nights, when there were cakes and ale and aching brows, rioting, remorse, and rioting again! The verse of his youth is a complete armoury of whatever can be said in flattery of women, and of most that can be imagined against them. The compliments he pays them are always double-edged : I walk to find a true love and I see I wish; a six or four; For should my true-love less than woman be, By preference he is frankly abusive: If thou be'est born to strange sights, Ride ten thousand days and nights Till Age snow white hairs on thee; And swear No where Lives a woman true and fair.2 In his rage against a coquette who has induced Love to implant himself with all her barbed lures and deceits in his heart, he threatens the god and her that, after executing a misanthropic will by which he gives, among other generous bequests of nothings, My best civility, And courtship to an University, he will, vindictively, even perish : I'll undo The world by dying, because love dies too. Thou, Love, taught'st me by making me Love her who doth neglect both me and thee, To invent and practise this one way, to annihilate all three !3 Conjugal affection itself with him has more passion than respect in it: Stay O sweet, and do not rise; The light that shines comes from thine eyes; Stay, or else my joys will die, And perish in their infancy.4 Ingenuity is his forte; and in that he is transcendent. Try to unravel the web, for instance, of The Primrose, The Bracelet-Ben Jonson's favourite-with its alternate curses and blessings upon the thief of the jewel, according as, child of Hell or 'honest man', he kept or restored it— and think how little Mrs. Donne, and other objects of the poems-perhaps, for the most part, fortunately-understood of them. His fancy coils and uncoils, as if it were a serpent, progressing all the time. Its point of honour is to say nothing as it had ever been said before; to be brilliant, almost idolatrous; everything which a lover can be, except sweet and gentle. Yet, within the limits, what mastery! Readers must allow for a harshness of phraseology, which Donne seems to have cultivated, and for a rhythm which, though possessing a harmony of its own, is as uncouth. Subject to |