the great soule which here among us now Doth dwell, and moves that hand, and tongue, and brow Which, as the Moone the sea, moves us. Donne can hardly have thought of publishing such a poem, or circulating it in the Queen's lifetime. It was an expression of the mood which begot the 'black and envious slanders breath'd against Diana for her divine justice on Actaeon' to which Jonson refers in _Cynthia's Revels_ the same year. That some copies were circulated in manuscript later is probably due to the reaction which brought into favour at James's Court the Earl of Southampton and the former adherents of Essex generally. The tone, moreover, of the stanza quoted above suggests that it was no vulgar libel on Elizabeth which Donne contemplated. Elizabeth, the cruel persecutor of his Catholic kinsfolk, now stained with the blood of her favourite, appeared to him somewhat as she did to Pope Sixtus, a heretic but a great woman. He felt to her as Burke did to the 'whole race of Guises, Condés and Colignis'--'the hand that like a destroying angel smote the country communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered.' In a mood of bitter admiration, of sceptical and sardonic wonder, he contemplates the great bad souls who had troubled the world and served it too, for the idea on which the poem was to rest is the disconcerting reflection that we owe many good things to heretics and bad men: Who ere thou beest that read'st this sullen Writ, Which just so much courts thee, as thou dost it, Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with mee, Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest, Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest, By cursed _Cains_ race invented be, And blest _Seth_ vext us with Astronomie. Ther's nothing simply good, nor ill alone, Of every quality comparison, The onely measure is, and judge, opinion. It would have been interesting to read Donne's history of the great souls that troubled and yet quickened the world from Cain to Arius and from Mahomet to Elizabeth, but unfortunately Donne never got beyond the introduction, a couple of cantos which describe the progress of the soul while it is still passing through the vegetable and animal planes, the motive of which, so far as it can be disentangled, is to describe the pre-human education of a woman's soul: keeping some quality Of every past shape, she knew treachery, Rapine, deceit, and lust, and ills enow To be a woman.