ormal
rather than in a spiritual sense. Even when he took Holy Orders in 1615,
at the age of forty-two, he appears to have done so less in answer to any
impulse to a religious life from within than because, with the downfall of
Somerset, all hope of advancement through his legal attainments was
brought to an end. Undoubtedly, as far back as 1612, he had thought of
entering the Church. But we find him at the end of 1613 writing an
epithalamium for the murderers of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is a curious
fact that three great poets--Donne, Ben Jonson, and Campion--appear,
though innocently enough, in the story of the Countess of Essex's sordid
crime. Donne's temper at the time is still clearly that of a man of the
world. His jest at the expense of Sir Walter Raleigh, then in the Tower,
is the jest of an ungenerous worldling. Even after his admission into the
Church he reveals himself as ungenerously morose when the Countess of
Bedford, in trouble about her own extravagances, can afford him no more
than L30 to pay his debts. The truth is, to be forty and a failure is an
affliction that might sour even a healthy nature. The effect on a man of
Donne's ambitious and melancholy temperament, together with the memory of
his dissipated health and his dissipated fortune, and the spectacle of a
long family in constant process of increase, must have been disastrous. To
such a man poverty and neglected merit are a prison, as they were to
Swift. One thinks of each of them as a lion in a cage, ever growing less
and less patient of his bars. Shakespeare and Shelley had in them some
volatile element that could, one feels, have escaped through the bars and
sung above the ground. Donne and Swift were morbid men suffering from
claustrophobia. They were pent and imprisoned spirits, hating the walls
that seemed to threaten to close in on them and crush them. In his poems
and letters Donne is haunted especially by three images--the hospital, the
prison, and the grave. Disease, I think, preyed on his mind even more
terrifyingly than warped ambition. "Put all the miseries that man is
subject to together," he exclaims in one of the passages in that luxuriant
anthology that Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith has made from the _Sermons_;
"sickness is more than all .... In poverty I lack but other things; in
banishment I lack but other men; but in sickness I lack myself." Walton
declares that it was from consumption that Donne suffered; but he had
probably the see