One quality of his verse, which has been somewhat overlooked by critics intent upon the definition and sources of metaphysical wit, is wit in our sense of the word, wit like the wit of Swift and Sheridan. The habit in which this wit masquerades is doubtless old-fashioned. It is not always the worse for that, for the wit of the Elizabethans is delightfully blended with fancy and feeling. There is a little of Jaques in all of them. But if fanciful and at times even boyish, Donne's wit is still amusing, the quickest and most fertile wit of the century till we come to the author of _Hudibras_. It is not in the _Satyres_ that this wit is to us most obvious. Nothing grows so soon out of date as contemporary satire. Even the brilliance and polish of Pope's satire--and Pope's art is nowhere more perfect than in _The Dunciad_ and the _Imitations of Horace_--cannot interest us in Lord Hervey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the forgotten poets of an unpoetic age. How then should we be interested in Elizabeth's fantastic 'Presence', the streets of sixteenth-century London, and the knavery of pursuivants, presented with a satiric art which is wonderfully vivid and caustic but still tentative,--over-emphatic, rough in style and verse, though with a roughness which is obviously a studied and in a measure successful effect. The verses upon _Coryats Crudities_ are in their way a masterpiece of insult veiled as compliment, but it is a rather boyish and barbarous way. It is in the lighter of his love verses that Donne's laughable wit is most obvious and most agile. Whatever one may think of the choice of subject, and the flame of a young man's lust that burns undisguised in some of the _Elegies_, it is impossible to ignore the dazzling wit which neither flags nor falters from the first line to the last. And in the more graceful and fanciful, the less heated _Songs and Sonets_, the same wit, gay and insolent, disports itself in a philosophy of love which must not be taken altogether seriously. Donne at least, as we shall see, outgrew it. His attitude is very much that of Shakespeare in the early comedies. But the Petrarchian love, which Shakespeare treats with light and charming irony, the vows and tears of Romeo and Proteus, Donne openly scoffs. He is one of Shakespeare's young men as these were in the flesh and the Inns of Court, and he tells us frankly what in their youthful cynicism (which is often even more of a pose than their idealism) they think of love, and constancy, and women. Of all miracles, Donne cries, a constant woman is the greatest, of all strange sights the strangest: If thou findst one, let mee know, Such a Pilgrimage were sweet; Yet doe not, I would not goe, Though at next doore wee might meet, Though shee were true, when you met her, And last, till you write your letter, Yet shee Will bee False, ere I come, to two, or three.