The only thing that such a criticism leaves unexplained and undefined is the interest which Donne's poetry still has for us, not as an historical phenomenon, but as poetry. Literary history has for the historian a quite distinct interest from that which it possesses for the student and lover of literature. For the historian it is a matter of positive interest to connect Donne's wit with the general disintegration of mediaeval thought, to recognize the influence on the Elizabethan drama of the doctrines of Machiavelli, or to find in Pope's achievement in poetry a counterpart to Walpole's in politics. For the lover of literature none of these facts has any positive interest whatsoever. Donne's wit attracts or repels him equally whatever be its source; Tamburlaine and Iago lose none of their interest for us though we know nothing of Machiavelli; Pope's poetry is not a whit more or less poetical by being a strange by-product of the Whig spirit in English life. For the lover of literature, literary history has an indirect value. He studies history that he may discount it. What he relishes in a poet of the past is exactly the same essential qualities as he enjoys in a poet of his own day--life and passion and art. But between us and every poet or thinker of the past hangs a thinner or thicker veil of outworn fashions and conventions. The same life has clothed itself in different garbs; the same passions have spoken in different images; the same art has adapted itself to different circumstances. To the historian these old clothes are in themselves a subject of interest. His enjoyment of Shakespeare is heightened by finding the explanation of Falstaff's hose, Pistol's hyperboles, and the poet's neglect of the Unities. To the lover of literature they are, until by understanding he can discount them, a disadvantage because they invest the work of the poet with an irrelevant air of strangeness. He studies them that he may grow familiar with them and forget them, that he may clear and intensify his sense of what alone has permanent value, the poet's individuality and the art in which it is expressed. Donne's conceits, of which so much has been made and on whose historical significance Mr. Courthope has probably said the last word, are just like other examples of these old clothes. The question for literature is not whence they came, but how he used them. Is he a poet in virtue or in spite of them, or both? Are they fit only to be gathered into a museum of antiquated fashions such as Johnson prefixed to his study of the last poet who wore them in quite the old way (for Dryden, who pilfered more freely from Donne than from any of his predecessors, cut them to a new fashion), or are they the individual and still expressive dress of a true and great poet, commanding admiration in their own manner and degree as freshly and enduringly as the stiff and brocaded magnificence of Milton's no less individual, no less artificial style?