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He admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison.
But a stranger thing still is that the only man who ever wrote a book in palliation of suicide, should have been not only a Christian not only an official minister and dignitary of a metropolitan Christian church but also a scrupulously pious man. We allude, as the reader will suppose, to Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's. His opinion is worthy of consideration.
Their failures and misadventures, familiarly despised as "conceits," left them floundering in absurdity. Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the full power and significance of figurative language been realised in English poetry.
Then one might indeed cry out with the celebrated Dr Donne: Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought That one might almost say her body thought. Her neck was long and finely turned: and here, if I was not afraid of offending her delicacy, I might justly say, the highest beauties of the famous Venus de Medicis were outdone.
Vous vous êtes donné la peine de naître! In that sentence one can hear far off, but distinct the flash and snap of the guillotine. To those happy listeners, though, no such sound was audible. Their speculations went another way.
But Gaspare, always a little ruthless with women, soon tired of such vanities. "Avanti! Avanti!" he shouted. "Dio mio! Le donne sono pazze! Andiamo! Andiamo!"
In the place of the logical subtleties which Donne and his school had sought in the scholastic writers of the Middle Ages, they brought back the typically Renaissance study of rhetoric; the characteristic of all the poetry of the period is that it has a rhetorical quality.
The homeliness and harshness of some of Cowper's language and versification, interchanged occasionally with the innocence of Ambrose Philips, or the quaintness of Quarles and Dr. Donne.
Then they began talking politics at me in a very polite manner, only I could not make head or tail of what they meant; and Mr Donne took a deal of notice of Leonard, and called him to him; and I am sure he noticed what a noble, handsome boy he was, though his face was very brown and red, and hot with digging, and his curls all tangled.
Etre simple, c'est le comble de l'art. Ca vous donne," he added, with clasped hands and a step backward, "ca vous donne tout a fait l'air d'une dame de Nattier." Madame took the hand-glass, and did not deny that she was eblouissante. If madame, suggested Monsieur Cadron, had but a little dress a la Marie Antoinette?
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