Donne's reputation as a poet has passed through many vicissitudes in the course of the last three centuries. With regard to his 'wit', its range and character, erudition and ingenuity, all generations of critics have been at one. It is as to the relation of this 'wit' to, and its effect on, his poetry that they have been at variance. To his contemporaries the 'wit' was identical with the poetry. Donne's 'wit' gave him the same supremacy among poets that learning and humour and art gave to Jonson among dramatists. To certain of his Dutch admirers the wit of _The Flea_ seemed superhuman, and the epitaph with which Carew closes his _Elegy_ expresses the almost universal English opinion of the seventeenth century: Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lies two flamens, and both those the best, Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest. It may be doubted if Milton shared this opinion. He never mentions Donne, but it was probably of him or his imitators he was thinking when in his verses at Cambridge he spoke of those new-fangled toys and trimmings slight Which take our late fantastics with delight. Certainly the growing taste for 'correctness' led after the Restoration to a discrimination between Donne's wit and his poetry. 'The greatest wit,' Dryden calls him, 'though not the greatest poet of our nation.' What he wanted as a poet were just the two essentials of 'classical' poetry--smoothness of verse and dignity of expression. This point of view is stated with clearness and piquancy in the sentences of outrageous flattery which Dryden addressed to the Earl of Dorset in the opening paragraphs of his delightful _Essay on Satire_: 'There is more of salt in all your verses, than I have seen in any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, of all our countrymen, had your talent; but was not happy enough to arrive at your versification; and were he translated into numbers, and English, he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression. That which is the prime virtue, and chief ornament, of Virgil, which distinguishes him from the rest of writers, is so conspicuous in your verses, that it casts a shadow on all your contemporaries; we cannot be seen, or but obscurely, while you are present. You equal Donne in the variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts; you excel him in the manner and the words. I read you both with the same admiration, but not with the same delight.