When Donne reached the age of thirty-four, Dr Merton, afterwards Bishop of Durham, urged him to take orders, and offered him a benefice, which he was generously to relinquish in his favour. Donne declined, on account, he said, of some past errors of life, which, 'though repented of and pardoned by God, might not be forgotten by men, and might cast dishonour on the sacred office.' When Sir F. Wooley died, Sir Robert Drury became his next protector. Donne attended him on an embassy to France, and his wife formed the romantic purpose of accompanying her husband in the disguise of a page. Here was a wife fit for a poet! In order to restrain her from her purpose, he had to address to her some verses, commencing, 'By our strange and fatal interview.' Isaak Walton relates how the poet, one evening, as he sat alone in Paris, saw his wife appearing to him in vision, with a dead infant in her arms--a proof at once of the strength of his love and of his imagination. This beloved and admirable woman died in 1617, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, and Donne's grief approached distraction. When he had reached the forty-second year of his age, our poet, at the instance of King James, became a clergyman, and was successively appointed Chaplain to the King, Lecturer to Lincoln's Inn, Dean of St Dunstan's in the West, and Dean of St Paul's. In the pulpit he attracted great attention, particularly from the more thoughtful and intelligent of his auditors. He continued Dean of St Paul's till his death, which took place in 1631, when he was approaching sixty. He died of consumption, a disease which seldom cuts down a man so near his grand climacteric. 'He was buried,' says Campbell, 'in St Paul's, where his figure yet remains in the vault of St Faith's, carved from a painting, for which he sat a few days' (it should be weeks) 'before his death, dressed in his winding-sheet.' He kept this portrait constantly by his bedside to remind him of his mortality. Donne's Sermons fill a large folio, with which we were familiar in boyhood, but have not seen since. De Quincey says, alluding partly to them, and partly to his poetry,--'Few writers have shewn a more extraordinary compass of powers than Donne, for he combined--what no other man has ever done--the last sublimation of dialectical subtlety and address with the most impassioned majesty. Massy diamonds compose the very substance of his poem on the 'Metempsychosis,'--thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or Aeschylus; while a diamond-dust of rhetorical brilliances is strewed over the whole of his occasional verses and his prose.' We beg leave to differ, in some degree, from De Quincey in his estimate of the 'Metempsychosis,' or 'The Progress of the Soul,' although we have given it entire. It has too many far-fetched conceits and obscure allegories, although redeemed, we admit, by some very precious thoughts, such as