What has happened is, I believe, this: Donne here, as elsewhere, used an obsolescent word, viz. 'eagers', the verb, meaning 'sharpens'. The copyist did not recognize the form, took 'desire' for the verb, and made 'eager' the adjectival complement to 'be', changing 'desire' to 'desires' as predicate to 'curse'. What Donne had in mind was the Aristotelian doctrine that the desire to beget children is an expression of man's craving for immortality. The most natural function, according to Aristotle, of every living thing which is not maimed in any way is to beget another living thing like itself, that so it may partake of what is eternal and divine. This participation is the goal of all desire, and of all natural activity. But perishable individuals cannot partake of the immortal and divine by continuous existence. Nothing that is perishable can continue always one and the same individual. Each, therefore, participates as best he may, some more, some less; remaining the same in a way, i.e. in the species, not in the individual.' (_De Anima_, B. 4. 415 A-B.) Donne's argument then is this: 'Why of all animals have we alone this feeling of depression and remorse after the act of love? Is it a device of nature to restrain us from an act which shortens the life of the individual (he refers here to a prevalent belief as to the deleterious effect of the act of love), needed because that other curse which Adam brought upon man, the curse of mortality, of being short, And only for a minute made to be, Eagers [i.e. whets or provokes] desire to raise posterity.' The latest use of 'eager' as a verb quoted by the O.E.D. is from Mulcaster's _Positions_ (1581), where the sense is that of imitating physically: 'They that be gawled ... may neither runne nor wrastle for eagering the inward'. The Middle English use is closer to Donne's: 'The nature of som men is so ... unconvenable that ... poverte myhte rather egren hym to don felonies.' Chaucer, Boëth. _De Consol. Phil._ In the Burley MS. (seventeenth century) the following epigram on Bancroft appears: A learned Bishop of this land Thinking to make religion stand, In equall poise on every syde The mixture of them thus he tryde: An ounce of protestants he singles And a dramme of papists mingles, Then adds a scruple of a puritan And melts them down in his brayne pan, But where hee lookes they should digest The scruple eagers all the rest. In Harl. MS. 4908 f. 83 the last line reads: That scruple troubles all the rest. PAGE =71=. A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW.