in our ear is a more attractive one than the harsh, censorious, burly but a little blustering Jonson of the epistles on country life and generous givers. Donne's style is less clumsy, his verse less stiff. His wit brings to a clear point whatever he has to say, while from his verse as from his prose letters there disengages itself a very distinct sense of what it was in the man, underlying his brilliant intellect, his almost superhuman cleverness, which won for him the devotion of friends like Wotton and Goodyere and Walton and King, the admiration of a stranger like Huyghens, who heard him talk as well as preach:--a serious and melancholy, a generous and chivalrous spirit. However, keepe the lively tast you hold Of God, love him as now, but feare him more, And in your afternoones thinke what you told And promis'd him, at morning prayer before. Let falshood like a discord anger you, Else be not froward. But why doe I touch Things, of which none is in your practise new, And Tables, or fruit-trenchers teach as much; But thus I make you keepe your promise Sir, Riding I had you, though you still staid there, And in these thoughts, although you never stirre, You came with mee to Micham, and are here. So he writes to Goodyere, but the letter to Wotton going Ambassador to Venice is Donne's masterpiece in this simpler style, and it seems to me that neither Daniel nor Jonson nor Drayton ever catches this note at once sensitive and courtly. To find a like courtliness we must go to Wotton; witness the reply to Donne's earlier epistle which I have printed in the notes. But neither Wotton nor any other of the courtly poets in Hannah's collection adds to this dignity so poignant a personal accent. This personal interest is very marked in the two satires which are connected by tone and temper with the letters, the third of the early, classical _Satyres_ and the opening and closing stanzas of the _Progresse of the Soule_. Each is a vivid picture of the inner workings of Donne's soul at a critical period in his life. The first was doubtless written at the moment that he was passing from the Roman to the Anglican Church. It is one of the earliest and most thoughtful appeals for toleration, for the candid scrutiny of religious differences, which was written perhaps in any country--one of the most striking symptoms of the new eddies produced in the stream of religious feeling by the meeting currents of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.