You were not tied by any painter's law
To square my circle, I confess, but draw
My superficies that was all you saw.

Which if in compass of no art it came
To be described by a monogram,

With one great blot you had form'd me as I am.

Good Life, Long Life.

It is not growing like a tree

In bulk, doth make man better be,

Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,
To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sear.
A lily of a day

Is fairer far in May,

Although it fall and die that night,
It was the plant and flower of light!

In small proportions we just beauties see :
And in short measures life may perfect be.

Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke.
Underneath this sable herse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother.
Death! ere thou hast slain another,
Learn'd and fair, and good as she,
Time shall throw a dart at thee.

This epitaph on Sidney's noble and accomplished sister, the Countess of Pembroke, for whose delectation the Arcadia was written, was first printed as Jonson's by Whalley in his edition of 1756. This delicate epitaph is universally attributed to our author, though it hath never yet been printed with his works; it is, therefore, with some pleasure that I have given it a place here.' But about a hundred years before Aubrey had expressly said that the epitaph was by William Browne of Tavistock. Critical opinion is divided as to the provenance; Mr Bullen takes it as Browne's, Mr Sidney Lee as Jonson's.

Epitaph on Elizabeth L. H.
Wouldst thou hear what man can say
In a little?-reader, stay.
Underneath this stone doth lie
As much beauty as could die;
Which in life did harbour give
To more virtue than doth live.

If at all she had a fault,
Leave it buried in this vault.
One name was Elizabeth;
The other, let it sleep with death:
Fitter where it died to tell,

Than that it lived at all. Farewell.

On My First Daughter.

Here lies, to each her parents' ruth,
Mary, the daughter of their youth:

Yet all heaven's gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.

At six months' end she parted hence

With safety of her innocence;

Whose soul Heaven's queen, whose name she bears, In comfort of her mother's tears,

Hath placed among her virgin train : Where, while that severed doth remain, This grave partakes the fleshly birth, Which cover lightly, gentle earth!

To Penshurst (the home of the Sidneys).
Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show
Of touch or marble; nor canst boast a row
Of polished pillars or a roof of gold:
Thou hast no lantern, whereof tales are told;
Or stair, or courts; but stand'st an ancient pile,
And these grudged at are reverenced the while.
Thou joy'st in better marks of soil, of air,

Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.
Thou hast thy walks for health as well as sport;
Thy mount to which the Dryads do resort,
Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made
Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade;
That taller tree which of a nut was set

At his great birth where all the Muses met.
There, in the writhed bark, are cut the names
Of many a sylvan, taken with his flames.
And thence the ruddy satyrs oft provoke
The lighter fauns to reach thy Lady's Oak.
Thy copse, too, named of Gamage, thou hast here,
That never fails, to serve thee, seasoned deer,
When thou wouldst feast or exercise thy friends.
The lower land that to the river bends,

Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed:
The middle ground thy mares and horses breed.
Each bank doth yield thee conies, and the tops
Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sydney's copse,
To crown thy open table, doth provide
The purpled pheasant with the speckled side:
The painted partridge lies in every field,
And for thy mess is willing to be killed.
And if the high-swoln Medway fail thy dish,
Thou hast thy ponds that pay thee tribute fish,
Fat aged carps that run into thy net,
And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat,
As loth the second draught or cast to stay,
Officiously at first themselves betray.
Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land
Before the fisher, or into his hand.

Thou hast thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers,
Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours.
The early cherry with the later plum,

Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come:
The blushing apricot and woolly peach
Hang on thy walls that every child may reach.
And though thy walls be of the country stone,
They're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan;
There's none that dwell about them wish them down;
But all come in, the farmer and the clown,
And no one empty-handed, to salute
Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.
Some bring a capon, some a rural cake,
Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make
The better cheeses, bring them, or else send

By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend
This way to husbands; and whose baskets bear
An emblem of themselves, in plum or pear.
But what can this (more than express their love)
Add to thy free provisions, far above

The need of such? whose liberal board doth flow
With all that hospitality doth know! . . .

Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see

Those proud ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells. Touch or touch-stone is black basalt; it was Sir Philip Sidney 'at whose birth all the Muses met;' Barbara Gamage was the wife of Sir Robert Sidney (Philip's brother), Earl of Leicester.

To the Memory of my beloved Master William
Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.
[Originally in the First Folio of Shakespeare, 1623.]
To draw no envy, Shakespeare, on thy name,
Am I thus ample to thy book and fame;
While I confess thy writings to be such

As neither man nor Muse can praise too much.
'Tis true, and all men's suffrage. But these ways
Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise;
For seeliest ignorance on these may light,
Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right:
Or blind affection, which doth ne'er advance
The truth, but gropes, and urges all by chance;
Or crafty malice might pretend this praise,
And think to ruin, where it seemed to raise.
These are as some infamous bawd or whore
Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more?
But thou art proof against them, and, indeed,
Above the ill fortune of them, or the need.
I therefore will begin: Soul of the age!
The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!
My Shakespeare, rise! I will not lodge thee by
Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie
A little further off, to make thee room:
Thou art a monument without a tomb,
And art alive still, while thy book doth live,
And we have wits to read and praise to give.
That I not mix thee so, my brain excuses,
I mean with great but disproportioned Muses:
For if I thought my judgment were of years,
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe's mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honour thee I will not seek
For names; but call forth thund'ring Eschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To live again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage: or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to shew,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age, but for all time!
And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When like Apollo he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm!
Nature herself was proud of his designs,
And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines!
Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,
As since she will vouchsafe no other wit.
The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ;
But antiquated and deserted lie,

As they were not of nature's family.

Yet must I not give nature all; thy art,

My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

Seneca

For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same,
And himself with it, that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn;
For a good poet's made as well as born.

And such wert thou! Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race

Of Shakespeare's mind and manners brightly shines In his well-turned and true-filed lines:

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

As brandished at the eyes of ignorance.
Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were
To see thee in our waters yet appear,

And make those flights upon the banks of Thames
That so did take Eliza and our James!
But stay; I see thee in the hemisphere
Advanced, and made a constellation there!
Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence chide or cheer the drooping stage,
Which since thy flight from hence hath mourned like
night,

And despairs day but for thy volume's light!

On the Portrait of Shakespeare.
[Under the Portrait by Droeshout in the First Folio.]
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature, to outdo the life:

O could he but have drawn his wit,
As well in brass, as he hath hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass :
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture, but his book.

Jonson's prose other than in drama may be illustrated by three paragraphs containing his judgment on Lord Bacon, taken from his Discoveries, which are in part a commonplace book of suggestions, in part a series of short essays on very various subjects, somewhat on the Baconian model:

From 'Discoveries.'

Dominus Verulamius.-One, though he be excellent, and the chief, is not to be imitated alone: for no imitator ever grew up to his author; likeness is always on this side truth. Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough or look aside from him without loss. He com manded where he spoke, and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end.

Scriptorum Catalogus.-Cicero is said to be the only wit that the people of Rome had equalled to their empire. Ingenium par imperio. We have had many, and in their several ages (to take in but the former seculum) sir

Thomas Moore, the elder Wiat, Henry earl of Surrey, Chaloner, Smith, Eliot, B. Gardiner, were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us. Sir Nicholas Bacon was singular and almost alone in the beginning of queen Elizabeth's time. Sir Philip Sidney and Mr Hooker (in different matter) grew great masters of wit and language, and in whom all vigour of invention and strength of judgment met. The earl of Essex, noble and high; and sir Walter Raleigh, not to be contemned either for judg ment or style. Sir Henry Savile, grave, and truly lettered; sir Edwin Sandys, excellent in both; lord Egerton, the chancellor, a grave and great orator, and best when he was provoked. But his learned and able (though unfortunate) successor is he who hath filled up all numbers, and performed that in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome. In short, within his view and about his times were all the wits born that could honour a language or help study. Now things daily fall, wits grow downward, and eloquence grows backward: so that he may be named, and stand as the mark and άkun of our language.

De Augmentis Scientiarum.-Julius Cæsar.-Lord St Alban.-I have ever observed it to have been the office of a wise patriot, among the greatest affairs of the state, to take care of the commonwealth of learning. For schools, they are the seminaries of state; and nothing is worthier the study of a statesman than that part of the republic which we call the advancement of letters. Witness the care of Julius Cæsar, who in the heat of the civil war writ his books of Analogy and dedicated them to Tully. This made the late lord St Alban entitle his work Novum Organum: which though by the most of superficial men, who cannot get beyond the title of nominals, it is not penetrated nor understood, it really openeth all defects of learning whatsoever, and is a book

Qui longum noto scriptori proroget ævum.

My conceit of his person was never increased toward him by his place or honours: but I have and do reverence him for the greatness that was only proper to himself, in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one of the greatest men and most worthy of admiration that had been in many ages. In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength; for greatness he could not want. Neither could I condole in a word or syllable for him, as knowing no accident could do harm to virtue, but rather help to make it manifest.

It was Ben who said-what is better applicable to another court than he knew-'A virtuous court a world to virtue draws;' 'Contempt of fame begets contempt of virtue;' 'Apes are apes though clothed in scarlet;' 'Posterity pays every man his honour ;' and who spoke of one plagued with an itching leprosy of wit.' 'Spread yourself on his bosom publicly whose heart you would eat in private' is one of his most cynical phrases; only less caustic is "Tis the common disease of all your musicians that they know no mean to be entreated either to begin or end.'

The standard edition of Jonson is the far from perfect one of Gifford (9 vols. 1816; reissued with some additional notes by Colonel Cunningham in 1875); a selection of the plays was edited by Brinsley Nicholson and C. H. Herford for the 'Mermaid Series' (3 vols. 1893-95); there are selections of plays and poems by Morley

(1884) and J. A. Symonds (1886); and Mr Wheatley's edition of Every Man in his Humour has a valuable introduction. See the Life by Gifford, Symonds's Ben Jonson in the English Worthies' series (1886), Mr Swinburne's brilliant Study of Ben Jonson (1890), and the valuable section on Jonson in Dr A. W. Ward's English Dramatic Literature (new ed. 1899).

John Donne, gallant and courtier, wit and poet, lived to be one of the greatest preachers of the English Church, and died the saintly Dean of St Paul's. He was born in London in 1573, his father, a prosperous ironmonger, being possibly of Welsh descent. His mother, daughter of John Heywood, epigrammatist and writer of interludes (supra, page 153), was descended from Sir Thomas More's sister; the family on both sides were devout Catholics, and several of them suffered danger and exile for the Catholic cause. John Donne, whose father died in 1576, leaving his widow with six children, was sent to Hart Hall, Oxford, but graduated at Cambridge, and was entered at Lincoln's Inn in 1592. He read much law and controversial theology, was bookish but sprightly and even wild, and allowed his exuberant vitality to carry him into unbecoming dissipations. His early poems, many of them outspokenly sensual and at times cruelly cynical, are held by Mr Gosse to contain a sincere autobiographical record of a scandalous liaison with a married woman, besides other lesser irregularities. He travelled abroad, took part in Essex's Cadiz expedition, and on his return was appointed secretary to the Lord-Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere and Chancellor. He now came to know many of the most eminent men of the day, and wrote, without printing it, great part of his poetry. A characteristic poem of this time, The Progress of the Soul (1601), or Metemp sychosis, pursues a deathless soul through its transmigrations into many bodies, including those of a sparrow, a fish eaten by a pike, which is swallowed by a bird, and that by a whale. He fell violently in love with a niece of the LordKeeper's wife, and the pair were clandestinely married at the end of 1601; in consequence Donne was dismissed, and even for a time imprisoned. In the trying years of poverty that followed he showed an amount of servility to unworthy courtiers, such as Somerset and Buckingham, that even the custom of the age cannot justify; he did much of Somerset's dirty work in securing the divorce of his paramour, the afterwards so infamous Countess of Essex, and even wrote a gushing epithalamium for their remarriage. Having become an Anglican, Donne helped Dean (afterwards Bishop) Morton in his controversial writings against the Catholics, and himself indited a volume on the Catholics and the oaths of allegiance (The Pseudo-Martyr) and against the Jesuits (Ignatius his Conclave). Biathanatos, also a prose work, proved suicide to be no very heinous sin. Donne's Divine Poems mostly belong to this period, and include Holy Sonnets and A Litany. The first poem he printed was an elegy (1611) on Sir Robert Drury's

daughter, a child of fifteen, whom he had never seen; this he followed next year by another (The Anatomy of the World), and yet a third, all containing beautiful and even splendid passages, but marred by overmultiplied and overstrained conceits and utterly preposterous hyperbole 'enormous and disgusting hyperboles' is a phrase of Dr Johnson's. Thus Donne declares death now Can find nothing after her to kill,

Except the world itself, so great as she :

the world could better have spared the sun, and by reason of this damsel's death is now a mere cripple and the ghost of its former self! But the elegies so commended the

elegist that Drury gave him and his wife free quarters in his house, and took the poet abroad with him. It was at Paris that Donne saw the vision of his wife with a dead child in her arms, afterwards proved a veritable fact. Donne had ere this offered to go into the Church if he could thus secure patronage; and now in 1615 he did so, after mysterious delays and hesitations, credited by Walton to his remorse for youthful sins, open-partly at least -to a less gracious reference to worldly calculations and ambitious hopes. The

but

shroud and standing on an urn in a specially warmed room. From his ordination till near his end Donne wrote few poems; his trenchant thought, his brilliant fancy, his profound insight, and his command of the English tongue finding outlet in his sermons.

Donne's poems-songs and quatorzains, satires, elegies, religious poems, complimentary epistles in verse, epithalamiums, epigrams, and miscellaneous meditations in metre-were many of them diligently handed about in manuscript from the beginning, but were not collected and published till 1633. In virtue of his early poems, whose erotic sensualism he in later days regretted

though he preserved the MSS., as Beza, another Churchman, republished his erotic verse Donne ranks in a sense with earlier and contemporary Elizabethans, but seems to have consciously revolted against their mellifluous monotonies, their pseudo-classical nomenclature, their pastoral and other conventions. His hard and crabbed style is to some extent deliberately adopted; we may even congratulate ourselves that so much perfect and melodious verse took that shape as it were in spite of him. He stands curiously apart from the master influences in poetry at home] As Mr Gosse points out, he took no interest in Shakespeare, in Bacon, in Daniel, or in Drayton, and had relations with Ben Jonson alone of the notable English poets of his day. He was markedly influenced by Spanish literature, but was original to a fault. In virtue of his studied carelessness, his avoidance of smoothness or form, his pedantry, his infectious harshness, this 'foremost of the metaphysical poets' opens a new era, if he does not found a school Even as handed about in his early manhood, Donne's privately circulated MS. poems had a great vogue, and a powerfulevidently too powerful-influence on the next generation, who could more easily imitate his eccentricities and extravagances than rival his soaring flights and exquisite beauties. Ben Jonson told Drummond that he held Donne 'the first pcet in the world in some things,' yet added that 'for not keeping accent he deserved to

king encouraged him to take English orders. Either now, as one would hope, or, as Mr Gosse thinks, after his wife's death (1617), his deeper nature was stirred to true religious zeal, and theology was no longer a hobby or a professional exercise. Walton's story that Donne had fourteen livings offered him in his first year of clerical life is shown by Mr Gosse to be quite incredible; but seasonable preferments came fairly soon. In 1616 he received the livings of Keyston in Huntingdon and Sevenoaks in Kent, but he never lived in either parish. Various preacherships he also held, and in 1621 became Dean of St Paul's. Charles I. had resolved to make him a bishop, but Donne died on the 31st of March 1631, before this purpose was carried out. He was buried in St Paul's, and by-and-by that eccentric monument was erected from the painting made in the last month of the Dean's life-the invalid solemnly posing to the artist sheeted in a

be hanged,' and that he would perish from not being understood. It must be accounted a glory to Donne that George Herbert and his brother of Cherbury were, for good or evil, his pupils, and the mystic Crashaw, too; Carew was another enthusiastic admirer. In Dryden's judgment Donne was 'the greatest wit though not the best poet of our nation,' for of course Dryden sympathised with the contrary influences represented by Waller, Denham, and Cowley. Donne was discredited in the later seventeenth century and all the eighteenth. But Mr Gosse traces Donne's influence in Pope even, and thinks the modern appreciation of Donne began with Browning, who was very directly influenced, and put the Mandrake Song to music. Now it is agreed that, amidst roughness and obscurity, far-fetched allusion, contorted imagery and allegory, and unrhythmical wit, Donne often presents us with poetry of a high order, in expression as well as in thought.

With Hall, Donne was one of the first English satirists on the regular Latin model: Buchanan's satires were in Latin, and Skelton and Lyndsay belong to a different category. Dryden, Pope, and Young took over and smoothed Donne's type of rhyming couplet; and Pope, acting on Dryden's hint, modernised some of Donne's satires. His swift transitions from voluptuous ecstasies to meditation on the mystery of life and death, and his profound but at times not a little fantastic speculations, no doubt contributed to securing for Donne the epithet seldom precisely used-of 'metaphysical.' His intellect was active and keen, his fancy vivid and picturesque, his wit playful and yet caustic. His too great terseness and prodigality of ideas breeds obscurity; the uneven and crabbed versification, with superfluous syllables to be slurred over, and accents that must be thrown on the wrong syllables-however much a part of his conscious design-is puzzling ; you have to understand the poem before you can scan his verse. The conceits are often not merely striking but suggestive and beautiful, lightly and gracefully handled. Mr Gosse praises especially :

Doth not a Teneriffe or higher hill

Rise so high like a rock that one might think The floating moon would shipwreck there and sink. On the other hand, Donne constantly piles up Ossas upon Pelions of metaphors, prefers such as are puerile or grotesque-defying the good taste of his own time as well as ours-and overelaborates them to wearisomeness. Thus, treating of a broken heart, he runs off into a play on the expression 'broken heart.' He entered a room, he says, where his mistress was present, and Love, alas,

At one first blow did shyver yt [his heart] as glasse. Then, insisting on the idea of a heart broken to pieces, he goes on to exhaust the conceit and make it tedious:

Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
Nor any place be emptye quyte;
Therefore I think my brest hath all

Those peeces still, though they do not unyte:
And now as broken glasses showe
A thousand lesser faces, soe

My raggs of hart can like, wish, and adore; But after one such love can love no more.

Address to Bishop Valentine, on the Day of the Marriage of the Elector Palatine to the Princess Elizabeth.

Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is,
All the air is thy diocis,

And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners :

Thou marryest every year

The lyrique larke, and the grave whispering dove,
The sparrow, that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher;

Thou mak'st the black bird speed as soon
As doth the goldfinch or the halcion; . . .
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day, which might inflame thyself, old Valentine.
Valediction forbidding Mourning.

As virtuous men pass myldly away,

And whisper to their sowles to goe,
Whilst some of their sad freinds doe say,

Now his breath goes, and some say, noe;
Soe let us melt, and make no noise,

No tear-floods nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere prophanation of our joyes
To tell the laietie our love.

Movinge of th' earth brings harms and feares,
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidations of the sphæres,
Though greater farr, are innocent.
Dull sublunary Lovers' love,

Whose sowle is sence, cannot admytt
Absence; for that it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.
But we, by a love so far refynde
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mynde,

Care less eyes, lipps, and hands to miss.
Our two sowles therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, indure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gould to aerye thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two soe

As styff twynn compasses are two;
Thy sowle, the fixt foote, makes no showe
To move, but doth if th' other doe:

And though it in the center sytt,
Yet when the other farr doth rome,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foote, obliquely runn;
Thy fyrmness makes my circles just,

And makes me end where I begunn.