I confess this seems to me a somewhat exaggerated statement. When I turn from Donne's passionate and subtle songs and elegies to Sylvester's hum-drum and yet 'conceited' work, I find their styles eminently distinguishable. Mr. Upham indeed allows that Donne's genius makes 'vital and impressive' what in the original is 'vapid and commonplace'. He pleads for no more than an 'element of French suggestion'. Of the most characteristic features of Du Bartas's rhetoric, his affected antitheses, his studied alliterative effects, and especially his double-epithets 'aime-carnage', 'charme-souci', 'blesse-honneur', Sylvester's 'forbidden-Bit-lost-glory', 'the Act-simply-pure', &c., Mr. Upham admits that Donne makes sparing use. Donne uses a fair number of compounds but the majority of these are nouns and verbs. Of the epithets only one or two are of the sentence-compressing character which the French poet cultivated. The most like is 'full-on-both-side-written rolls'. The real link between Du Bartas and Donne is that they are metaphysical poets. Following Lucretius, whom he often translates, the Frenchman set himself to give a scientific account of the creation of the universe as outlined in _Genesis_. He describes with the utmost minuteness of detail, and necessarily uses similes better fitted to elucidate and illustrate than to give poetic pleasure, drawn from the most everyday sources as well as arts and sciences. It was part of the programme of the _Pléiade_ thus to annex the vocabulary of learning and the crafts. Now Donne may have read Du Bartas in the original, or he may have seen some parts of Sylvester's translation (it did not appear till 1598), as it was in preparation, though to a Catholic, as Donne was, the poem would not have the attraction it had for Protestant poets in England, Holland, and Germany. The bent of his own mind was to metaphysics, to erudition, and also to figures realistic and surprising rather than beautiful. It would be rash to deny that he may have found in Du Bartas a style which he preferred to the Italianate picturesqueness of sonneteers and idyllists, and been encouraged to follow his bent. That he borrowed his style from Du Bartas is _non proven_: and there are in his work strains of feeling, thought, and learning which cannot be traced to the French poet. Two poets more essentially unlike it would be difficult to imagine. There are very few passages where one can trace or conjecture echoes or borrowings (see note, II. p. 193). I agree indeed with Mr. Upham that the poems which most strongly suggest that Donne had been reading Du Bartas are the First and Second _Anniversaries_, which Sir Sidney Lee inadvertently calls early poems. Here at least he is often dealing with the same themes. One can illustrate his thought from Du Bartas. Perhaps it was the latter's poem which suggested the use of marginal notes, giving the argument of the poem. [Sidenote: _Spanish._]