contemptuously of 'giddy fantastic poets,' and, when he allowed himself
to write poetry, he was resolved to do something different from what
anybody had ever done before, not so much from the artist's instinctive
desire of originality, as from a kind of haughty, yet really bourgeois,
desire to be indebted to nobody. With what care he wrote is confessed in
a passage of one of his letters, where, speaking of a sermon, he says:
'For, as Cardinal Cusanus wrote a book, _Cribratio Alchorani_, I have
cribrated, and re-cribrated, and post-cribrated the sermon, and must
necessarily say, the King, who hath let fall his eye upon some of my
poems, never saw, of mine, a hand, or an eye, or an affection, set down
with so much study and diligence, and labour of syllables, as in this
sermon I expressed those two points.' But he thought there were other
things more important than being a poet, and this very labour of his was
partly a sign of it. 'He began,' says Mr. Gosse with truth, 'as if
poetry had never been written before.' To the people of his time, to
those who came immediately after him, he was the restorer of English
poetry.

The Muses' garden, with pedantic weeds
O'erspread, was purged by thee,

says Carew, in those memorial verses in which the famous lines occur:

Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.

Shakespeare was living, remember, and it was Elizabethan poetry that
Donne set himself to correct. He began with metre, and invented a system
of prosody which has many merits, and would have had more in less
arbitrary hands. 'Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging,'
said Ben Jonson, who was nevertheless his friend and admirer. And yet,
if one will but read him always for the sense, for the natural emphasis
of what he has to say, there are few lines which will not come out in at
all events the way that he meant them to be delivered. The way he meant
them to be delivered is not always as beautiful as it is expressive.
Donne would be original at all costs, preferring himself to his art. He
treated poetry as AEsop's master treated his slave, and broke what he
could not bend.

But Donne's novelty of metre is only a part of his too deliberate
novelty as a poet. As Mr. Gosse has pointed out, with a self-evident
truth which has apparently waited for him to say it, Donne's real
position in regard to the poetry of his time was that of a realistic
writer,