) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins.
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins.
John Donne
Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1563-1648), the eldest son of
Donne's friend Mrs. Magdalen Herbert, had not long returned from his
first visit to France when he set out again in 1610 with Lord Chandos
'to pass to the city of Juliers which the Prince of Orange resolved to
besiege. Making all haste thither we found the siege newly begun; the
Low Country army assisted by 4,000 English under the command of
Sir Edward Cecil. We had not long been there when the Marquis de
la Chartre, instead of Henry IV, who was killed by that villain
Ravaillac, came with a brave French army thither'. _Autobiography_,
ed. Sidney Lee. The city was held by the Archduke Leopold for the
Emperor. The Dutch, French, and English were besieging the town in the
interest of the Protestant candidates, the Elector of Brandenburg, and
the Palatine of Neuburg. The siege marked the beginning of the Thirty
Years' War. Herbert was a man of both ability and courage but of
a vanity which outweighed both. Donne's letter humours both his
Philosophical pose and his love of obscurity and harshness in poetry.
His own poems with a few exceptions are intolerably difficult and
unmusical, and Jonson told Drummond that 'Donne said to him he wrote
that Epitaph upon Prince Henry, _Look to me Faith_, to match Sir Ed.
Herbert in obscureness'. (Jonson's _Conversations_, ed. Laing.
) The
poems have been reprinted by the late Professor Churton Collins. In
1609 when Herbert was in England he and Donne both wrote Elegies on
Mistress Boulstred.
l. 1. _Man is a lumpe, &c. _ The image of the beasts Donne has borrowed
from Plato, _The Republic_, ix. 588 B-E.
PAGE =194=, ll. 23-6. A food which to chickens is harmless poisons
men. Our own nature contributes the factor which makes a food into a
poison either corrosive or killing by intensity of heat or cold:
'Et hic nota quod tantus est ordo naturae, ut quod est venenosum et
inconveniens uni est utile et conveniens alteri; sicut jusquiamus
qui est cibus passeris licet homini sit venenosus; et sicut napellus
interficit hominem solum portatus, et mulierem praegnantem non laesit
manducatus, teste Galieno; et mus qui pascitur napello est tiriaca
contra napellum. ' Benvenuto on Dante, _Div. Comm. _: _Paradiso_, i. The
plants here mentioned are henbane and aconite. Concerning hemlock the
O.
