DONNE, DR JOHN, a poet and divine, was born at London in 1573. His parents were of the Roman Catholic faith, and used their utmost efforts to keep him firm in the same persuasion; but an early examination of the controversy between the Church of Rome and the Protestants determined him to adhere to the creed of the latter. After having prosecuted the study of law for some time at Lincoln's Inn, he travelled into Italy and Spain, where he learned the languages of both countries to perfection. Soon after his return to England, Sir Thomas Egerton, keeper of the great seal, appointed him his secretary; and in this post Donne continued five years. Having however married privately Anne, the daughter of Sir George Moore, then chancellor of the garter, and niece to the lord keeper's lady, he was dismissed from his situation at the instigation of his father-in-law, and thrown into prison. But he was afterwards reconciled to Sir George by the good offices of Sir Francis Wooley. In 1612 he accompanied Sir Robert Drury to Paris. During this time many of the nobility solicited the king to give him some secular employment. But James I., who took pleasure in his conversation, and was highly delighted with his Pseudo-Martyr, a polemic treatise against Catholicism, printed at London in 1610, prevailed on the author to enter into holy orders, and appointed him one of his chaplains. He also procured him the degree of doctor of divinity from the university of Oxford. In 1619 Dr Donne attended the Earl of Donecaul in his embassy into Germany. In 1621 he was made dean of St Paul's; and the vicarage of St Dunstan in the West soon afterwards fell to him. Besides the work above men-
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tioned, he wrote Devotions upon emergent Occasions; the Ancient History of the Septuagint, translated from the Greek of Aristaeus, 1633, 12mo; Three volumes of Sermons, 1640, 1649, 1660, folio; A Treatise against suicide, entitled Bia-thanatos; and Poems.
Donne's writings show him to have been a man of wit and learning; but he chiefly excelled in satire. Lord Falkland, no mean judge, styles him one of the most witty and most eloquent of modern divines. His reputation as a poet was higher in his own time than it has been since. Dryden, with his usual judgment and discrimination, characterizes him as "the greatest wit, though not the best poet, of our own nation;" and adds, that "he affects metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign, and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softness of love." Donne's numbers, if they may be so called, are certainly the most rugged and uncouth of any of our poets; yet he was certainly not ignorant nor unskilled in the higher attributes of style, for he wrote elegantly in Latin, and displays considerable taste in some of his smaller pieces and epigrams.