he at all approached in intellectual or spiritual stature to the great Doctor of the Western Church. But still there was in Donne the same tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in youthful lusts, the same conflict with these, and the same final deliverance from them; and then the same passionate and personal grasp of the central truths of Christianity, linking itself as this did with all that he had suffered, and all that he had sinned, and all through which by God’s grace he had victoriously struggled. P. 142, No. cxxv.--There is a certain residue of truth in Johnson’s complaint of the blending of incongruous theologies, or rather of a mythology and a theology, in this poem--Neptune and Phœbus and Panope and the Fury mixed up with St. Peter and a greater than St. Peter, and a fierce assault on the Clergy of the Church. At the same time there is a fusing power in the imagination, when it is in its highest exercise, which can bring together and chemically unite materials the most heterogeneous; and the fault of Johnson’s criticism is that he has no eye for the mighty force of this which in _Lycidas_ is displayed, and which has brought all or nearly all of its strange assemblage of materials into harmonious unity--and even where this is not so, hardly allows us to remember the fact, so wondrous is the beauty and splendour of the whole. But in weaker hands the bringing together of all which is here brought together, and the attempt to combine it all in one poem, would have inevitably issued in failure the most ridiculous.--l. 32-49: This and more than one other allusion in this poem implies that King wrote verses, and of an idyllic character, as would seem. In his brother’s Elegy, contained in the same volume in which _Lycidas_ first appeared, as much, and indeed a good deal more is said: ‘He dressed the Muses in the brav’st attire That e’er they wore.’ If he wrote English verse, and it is difficult to give any other meaning to these lines, none of it has reached us. A few pieces of Latin poetry bearing his name are scattered through the volumes of encomiastic verse which were issued from Cambridge during the time that he, as Fellow and Tutor of Christ’s, was connected with it. They are only of average merit.--l. 50: A glorious appropriation of Virgil, _Buc_. x. 9, 10, ‘Quæ nemora aut qui vos saltus habuere, puellæ Naiades, indigno cum Gallus amore peribat?’