Walton tells us that Donne's learning, in his eleventh year when he went to Oxford, 'made one then give this censure of him, "That this age had brought forth another Picus Mirandula; of whom story says that he was rather born than made wise by study."' 'In the most unsettled days of his youth', the same authority reports, 'his bed was not able to detain him beyond the hour of four in the morning; and it was no common business that drew him out of his chamber till past ten; all which time was employed in study; though he took great liberty after it.' 'He left the resultances of 1,400 authors, most of them abridged and analysed with his own hand.' The lists of authors prefixed to his prose treatises and the allusions and definite references in the sermons corroborate Walton's statement regarding the range of Donne's theological and controversial reading. [Sidenote: _Classical Literature._] Confining attention here to Donne's poetry, and the spontaneous evidence of learning which it affords, one would gather that his reading was less literary and poetic in character than was Milton's during the years spent at Horton. It is clear that he knew the classical poets, but there are few specific allusions. Ovid, Horace, and Juvenal one can trace, not any other with certainty, nor in his sermons do references to Virgil, Horace, or other poets abound. [Sidenote: _Italian._] Like Milton, Donne had doubtless read the Italian romances. One reference to Angelica and an incident in the _Orlando Furioso_ occur in the _Satyres_, and from the same source as well as from an unpublished letter we learn that he had read Dante. Aretino is the only other Italian to whom he makes explicit reference. [Sidenote: _French._] One of Régnier's satires opens in a manner resembling the fourth of Donne's, and in a letter written from France apparently in 1612 he refers to 'a book of French Satires', which Mr. Gosse conjectures to be Régnier's. The resemblance may be accidental, for Donne's _Satyres_ were written before the publication of Régnier's (1608, 1613), and Donne makes no explicit mention of him or any other French poet. We learn, however, from his letters that he had read Montaigne and Rabelais; and it is improbable that he did not share the general interest of his contemporaries in the poetry of the _Pléiade_. The one poet to whom recent criticism has pointed as the inspiration of Donne's metaphysical verse is the Protestant poet Du Bartas. Mr. Alfred Horatio Upham (_The French Influence in English Literature._ New York, 1908), and following him Sir Sidney Lee (_The French Renaissance in England._ Oxford, 1910), have insisted strongly on the importance of this influence. The latter goes so far as to say that 'Donne clothed elegies, eclogues, divine poems, epicedes, obsequies, satires, in a garb barely distinguishable from the style of Du Bartas and Sylvester', and that the metaphysical style in English poetry is a heritage from Du Bartas.