required not the least alteration by those that
came to shroud him." It was a strange chance that preserved his spectral
monument almost uninjured when St. Paul's was burned down in the Great
Fire, and no other monument in the cathedral escaped. Among all his
fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last
fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a
fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight
days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently
egoistic amid its worship, as in the verse:

Whilst my physicians by their love are grown
Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie
Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown
That this is my south-west discovery,
_Per fretum febris_, by these straits to die.

Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses, and his God.
Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but
none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places,
now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the
first man in a new found land.

V.--HORACE WALPOLE[1]

[1] _Letters of Horace Walpole_; Oxford University Press, 16 vols.,
96s. _Supplementary Letters_, 1919; Oxford University Press, 2
vols., 17s.

Horace Walpole was "a dainty rogue in porcelain" who walked badly. In his
best days, as he records in one of his letters, it was said of him that he
"tripped like a pewit." "If I do not flatter myself," he wrote when he was
just under sixty, "my march at present is more like a dab-chick's." A lady
has left a description of him entering a room, "knees bent, and feet on
tiptoe as if afraid of a wet floor." When his feet were not swollen with
the gout, they were so slender, he said, that he "could dance a minuet on
a silver penny." He was ridiculously lean, and his hands were crooked with
his unmerited disease. An invalid, a caricature of the birds, and not
particularly well dressed in spite of his lavender suit and partridge silk
stockings, he has nevertheless contrived to leave in his letters an
impression of almost perfect grace and dandyism. He had all the airs of a
beau. He affected coolness, disdain, amateurishness, triviality. He was a
china figure of insolence. He lived on the mantelpiece, and regarded
everything that happened on the floor as a rather low joke that could not
be helped. He warmed into