a Spaniard and retains of Greece nothing but his name, El Greco.

El Greco in fact exhibits many of the qualities that form the great modern attraction of Donne. Critics speak of his 'passionate conscious individualism'; of his determined effort to be original at any sacrifice'; of his genius as 'a restless, refusal of limitations'; of his style as 'full of extravagance, surprises, and strange contradictions.' All these phrases might be literally applied to Donne, and they exactly explain the fascination which he so often exercises to-day. Donne accepted no limitations. He used verse, as some one has said, to invade the province of prose; there is nothing, not even the ugly and disgusting, which his verse will not say, no manner, not even the rudest, which it will not adopt to attain its almost impossible ends. Verse itself, and still more poetry, were reluctant to have anything to do either with the crude grossness, or with the prosaic literalness, or with the unbodied dialectic, one or other of which was what, at different times, Donne brought for their shaping. But over that reluctance his strong brain and violent will rode roughshod, compelling them to do his bidding. Or perhaps that was only what he thought they did. It is not easy to force poetry to obey alien laws; and those who try to do so usually pay the penalty. Donne's penalty is that, while he ranks among the greatest geniuses who have written English poetry, he does not quite rank among the greatest English poets.

It is a disputed question whether poetry or prose has the wider range. Probably prose has, because, though poetry can ascend to imaginative heights on which prose cannot breathe, still prose is at home in much of the world of imagination as well as in the worlds of mere experience or abstract intellect. Donne, therefore, with his all-including intellectual covetousness, finds fewer pitfalls in the path of his prose. Here that colloquial ease to which his poetry owes some moments of pure felicity, finds its natural home. Here his eloquence and subtlety, the immense range and fiery energy of his mind, were less likely to defeat their own purpose. They were helped by a special circumstance. Donne's chief prose work is to be found in his sermons. We do not

know how closely the sermons, as we read them, correspond to what the preacher said in the pulpit. But in any case we can see what an advantage the limitations of the pulpit were to a man like Donne. As it is, he manages to be very free in it, sometimes to his own destruction. But its restraints would obviously prevent his colloquial realism from going too far; and the presence of a congregation, whose attention had to be held, would, even in those days, warn the virtuoso of curious and subtle intellectual fugues that the patience of an audience has limits.

The limits were evidently then very wide, as the full text of the sermons shows. So long as Donne's prose remained buried there, it could hardly hope for resurrection. But it has found a deliverer. Mr Pearsall Smith has given us a most interesting volume of selections from the sermons. Such a book cannot, of course, for students, supersede the complete text. But for the ordinary reader of English prose, and, we may add, for the ordinary user of books of devotion, Donne's sermons will in future mean Mr Pearsall Smith's selection.

The book opens with an admirable introduction of some forty pages. To discuss this would be, in the main, to reproduce it. It is better to refer readers to the original, in which they will find a brief sketch of Donne's life, preceded by an illuminating critical account of the writer and the man. It is full of good things, which the reader hopes he will remember or at least assimilate. Mr Pearsall Smith considers that Donne's mastery of the means of expression was even greater in prose than in poetry. He had at his command in this field, what he had not in the other, 'all the music and splendour of the great contemporary speech.' And when to this is added his subtlety of self-analysis, his awareness of the workings of his own mind'; and to this that acute sense of sin and especially of the sins of the flesh which belongs naturally to a preacher who had been the most sensual of all the great English poets'; and to this again, as I think Mr Smith would agree, an imagination of Time, Death, and Judgment as stupendous as that of Bossuet, and far more like a personal experience; we can guess before we begin the sermons what great things they must be. And so they are.

But, when Mr Smith tells us that 'the subject matter of the sermon is nothing less than the whole of life' he runs a risk of arousing expectations which cannot be fulfilled. Time, Death, and Judgment are tremendous things, and the issue between sin and goodness is the greatest of all issues. But these things, even all together, are not the whole of life. It is indeed one of the greatest difficulties of the preacher that he finds himself traditionally bound to pretend that they are. Hence he often produces a sense of unreality in the mind of the hearer, who knows that a large part of life involves no moral issues at all, that to attempt to force them upon it commonly leads to morbid scrupulosity which is a disease of the mind, and that goodness itself is not the only absolute sign of a full faith. For a full faith includes two others, truth and beauty, which are independent of it and of each other, and provide experiences in the presence of which the preacher's assumption, that the issue between sin and saintliness covers the whole of life, becomes meaningless and even a little absurd.

Not even Donne, then, can give us the whole of life in his sermons. But the part which he gives is invested with such greatness in his handling, that few indeed are the men who ever attain to an experience of the whole which gives them more. If the whole of life is not here, the whole of death is-more than the whole, if that could be; and, if there are things of earth which are out of range of the light shining from the pulpit, at least it here reveals in splendour all that we can imagine of heaven, and sets in a darkness which can be felt all that we can fear of hell. And these heights and depths are kept strangely human all the while. It is a man's voice that gives them utterance-a particular man, an individual, John Donne; and he is at home as he utters them. Never, I suppose, in English prose was such ease married to such greatness. His frankness is amazing, and must have played a large part in giving him that hold on his hearers to which so many contemporaries bear witness. He is not afraid to confess that he, the preacher, is liable to be interrupted in his prayers by many bad spirits and among them by the spirit of fornication.' And so, speaking as and for himself, and also as the voice of every man who heard him, he breaks

out into that wonderful prayer for forgiveness which recalls one of his best poems, and is itself a perfect example of the oceanic prose of that age, wave following wave, each mingling with each, not altogether like, and not altogether unlike, each other, a mobile and liquid succession of endless variety in continuity.

'Forgive me O Lord, O Lord forgive me my sinnes, the sinnes of my youth, and my present sinnes, the sinne that my Parents cast upon me, Originall sinne, and the sinnes that I cast upon my children, in an ill example; Actuall sinnes, sinnes which are manifest to all the world, and sinnes which I have so laboured to hide from the world, as that now they are hid from mine own conscience, and mine own memory; Forgive me my crying sins, and my whispering sins, sins of uncharitable hate, and sinnes of unchaste love, sinnes against Thee and Thee, against thy Power O Almighty Father, against thy Wisedome, O glorious Sonne, against thy Goodnesse, O blessed Spirit of God; and sinnes against Him and Him, against Superiours and Equals, and Inferiours; and sinnes against Me and Me, against mine own soul, and against my body, which I have loved better than my soul; Forgive me O Lord, O Lord in the merits of thy Christ and my Jesus, thine Anointed, and my Saviour; Forgive me my sinnes, all my sinnes, and I will put Christ to no more cost, nor thee to more trouble, for any reprobation or malediction that lay upon me, otherwise then as a sinner.'

Was there ever a printed sermon in which one heard the preacher's voice more plainly than we hear it in such a passage as this? It is the very genius of oratory, all the freedom of the speech of a voluble speaker, going on and on, as each new aspect of the subject comes into his head; and yet subtly and imperceptibly, perhaps unconsciously to the preacher himself, the freedom is controlled and form imposed upon the material, and the result is art, a masterpiece of English prose. And the art in no way hides the sincerity and directness. The words are so many arrows shot by Donne at his hearers and going straight to their hearts. At this day, when Donne has been dead nearly three hundred years, few indeed are the sermons, old or new, read or heard, which awe us, as Donne's still do, with that kind of awe proper to the pulpit, the sense that we are sinners who stand, or rather who cannot stand, in the presence of

God. With Donne's voice sounding in our ears we cannot escape and we dare not sleep.

'It is thy pleasure O God, and thy pleasure shall be infallibly accomplished, that every wicked person should be his owne Executioner. He is Spontaneus Dæmon, as S. Chrysostome speaks, an In-mate, an in-nate Devill; a bosome devill, a selfeDevill; That as he could be a tempter to himselfe, though there were no Devill, so he could be an Executioner to himselfe, though there were no Satan, and a Hell to himselfe, though there were no other Torment. Sometimes he staies not the Assises, but prevents the hand of Justice; he destroies himselfe before his time. But when he staies, he is evermore condemned at the Assises. Let him sleepe out as much of the morning as securely as he can; embellish, and adorne himselfe as gloriously as he can; dine as largely and as delicately as he can; weare out as much of the afternoone, in conversation, in Comedies, in pleasure, as he can; sup with as much distension, and inducement of drousinesse as he can, that he may scape all remorse, by falling asleepe quickly, and fall asleepe with as much discourse, and musicke, and advantage as he can, he hath a conscience that will survive, and overwatch all the company; he hath a sorrow that shall joyne issue with him when he is alone, and both God, and the devill, who doe not meet willingly, shall meet in his case, and be in league, and be on the sorrowes side, against him. The anger of God, and the malice of the devill, shall concurre with his sorrow, to his farther vexation. No one wicked person, by any diversion or cunning, shall avoid this sorrow, for it is in the midst, and in the end of all his forced contentments; Even in laughing, the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness.'

Or hear this in which we get the lightning without the thunder:

'We are all conceived in close Prison; in our Mothers wombes, we are close Prisoners all; when we are borne, we are borne but to the liberty of the house; Prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of Execution, to death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between New-gate, and Tyborne ? between the Prison, and the place of Execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never throughly awake; but passe on with such dreames, and imaginations as these, I may live as well, as another, and why should I dye, rather then another? but