individualities. After being at Oxford for two or three years, he went to London to seek his fortune. The court was the resort of gentlemen of nimble wits and indefinite aims, and Coryat succeeded in finding admission to the household of the young Prince Henry. Here he seems to have played something like the part of court jester, and to have become the butt of the courtiers. He was not without sense, but he exposed himself to ridicule by his vanity and eccentricities. In 1608 he undertook his noted journey on foot for five months through France and Italy, and in 1611 he published the narrative of his travels, his Crudities, after it had been for a time circulated in manuscript among his acquaintances. The book was a remarkable one, for Coryat possessed eyes, lively intelligence and a cultivated curiosity, and gave a better account of things worth seeing in the lands which he had visited than any previously printed in English. His style is animated and clear, and though not free from affectations, it has now and then a rich swell and felicity of expression. But Coryat found himself still the laughing-stock of the hangers-on of the court, his book was turned to ridicule by the versifiers, and when Prince Henry accepted the dedication of it he gave "strict and express command" that these "free and merry jests," as Coryat good-humoredly calls them, should be printed in the place of the commendatory verses which it was then the fashion to prefix to all sorts of books. Coryat fairly enough bids the courteous reader "to suspend thy censure of me till thou hast read over my whole book." Drayton, as well as Donne, was among the contributors to the folly, scurrility, and wit in the mass of good, bad, and indifferent verse. The book is one of the curiosities of literature.

In 1612 Coryat set out on a journey through the East. It was an extraordinary performance. From Constantinople he went to Jerusalem, thence to Armenia and through Mesopotamia to Persia, and thence to India. He died at Surat in 1617.

Page 126.

"Munster did towns, and Gesner authors show."

Coryat in his "Epistle dedicatory," admits his obligations to Munster, being "sometimes beholding to him for some special matter."

Munster's Cosmographia Universalis, first published in 1541, and often republished in the course of the century, was a useful book, containing a great mass of information about the then known world. Its maps and woodcuts are still of interest.

It was Gesner's Bibliotheca Universalis (1545-49) which "showed authors as Munster's Cosmographia Universalis "showed towns." "Conradus Gesner inter universales et perpetuos Catalogorum scriptores principatum obtinet," says Morhof in his Polyhistor—“the book," declared Dr. Johnson, upon which all my fame was originally founded."

66

Page 126.

"Mount now to Gallo-Belgicus; appear

As deep a statesman as a garreteer."

Cf. Satire IV, page 169: "To say Gallo-Belgicus without book." Cf. also page 185.

There are frequent references in the literature of the first quarter of the seventeenth century to the Gallo-Belgicus, "who," says George Chalmers in his Life of Rudiman, London, 1794, page 104, 66 seems to have been the first contemporary author who, in modern times, detailed events as they arose. The first volume, an 8vo of 650 pages, was printed at Cologne in 1598. Its title was Mercurii GalloBelgici; sive rerum in Gallia et Belgia potissimum, Hispania quoque, Italia, Anglia, Germania, Polonia, vicinisque locis ab anno 1588 ad Martium anni 1594 gestarum, Nuncii. It seems to have had success at once, and early in the seventeenth century it was published halfyearly, and was "usefully ornamented with maps.' It served a good purpose in the days before newspapers. It was still published in 1636, "but how long it continued," says Chalmers, "I know not." Its information, gathered often from hearsay, was often incorrect, and its style far from an elegant Latinity.

"And, if at any time you chance to meet

Some Gallo-Belgic phrase . . .

Let it pass,"

Says Virgil in Jonson's Poetaster, v, 1.

In 1616, in his notes on Bacon's Heads of the Charge, to be delivered in the trial of Somerset, King James wrote in regard to one of the heads, "No better than a gazette or passage of Gallo-Belgicus." Spedding, Letters and Life of Bacon, v, 289.

The Gallo-Belgicus was the parent of a vast number of other Mercuries published in England, France, and elsewhere for a hundred years or more.

The Gazetta was a Venetian invention of the same sort, a compilation of current news, and is said to have been first issued in 1536. It was not printed, but circulated in manuscript copies.

Page 127.

"for a lord,

Which casts at Portescue's."

I am unable to explain who or what was

"Portescue."

In 1858 the late Sir John Simeon printed for the Philobiblon Society a little volume containing six elegies ascribed to Donne, but never before printed. To these Dr. Grosart, in his edition of Donne's Poems, added two, derived from a manuscript, to the seclusion of which it had been better to leave them. The elegies printed by Sir John Simeon are obviously early compositions of the poet, if, indeed, they all be authentically his, of which I have some doubt,—and they contain little which a devout lover of Donne would regret to miss.

Page 131.

An Epithalamion on the Lady Elizabeth and Count Palatine.

The marriage of the Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the young Count Palatine of the Rhine, was celebrated on the 14th of February, 1613, with unusual pomp and ceremony. The Princess was, after her brother, the next heir to the Crown. She was but sixteen years old. There were great festivals of all sorts, and lavish expenditure. Among other entertainments was a masque by Beaumont, performed

"with great applause and approbation." The splendors of the occasion were in striking contrast to the calamities and poverty which not long after overtook the young pair, as the result of the folly of the Elector Palatine in accepting the crown of Bohemia. The memory of Elizabeth will be preserved not only by this poem of Donne's, but still more freshly by Sir Henry Wotton's exquisite verses, written about 1620, On his Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia, beginning,

"Ye meaner beauties of the night."

In 1613 Donne was forty years old.

Eclogue.

Page 136.

One would gladly spare from Donne's works this Eclogue and the Epithalamion which it prefaces, in celebration of the notorious marriage, in 1613, of the Earl of Somerset with the divorced Lady Essex. The adulation of the King and of his favorite is pushed to extravagance of servility. Donne was for years in the miserable position of a suppliant for the favors of those in power. He had learned "what hell it is in suing long to bide." One of his letters, addressed to Somerset (while Viscount Rochester) the year before Somerset's marriage, affords further illustration of the depth of flattery to which he could descend. He says, "After I was grown to be your Lordship's by all the titles that I could think upon, it hath pleased your Lordship to make another title by buying me. You may have made many better bargains in your purchases, but never a better title than to me, nor anything which you may call yours more absolutely and entirely. . . . My thankfulness cannot reach to the benefits already received, and the favour of receiving my letters is a new benefit. . . . I should never wish any other station than such as might make me still, and only, Your Lordship's most humble and devoted servant." Letters, p. 290. This tone of servility was indeed, to use Bacon's distinction in his own case, a vitium temporis even more than a vitium hominis, yet it is painful to find a man of Donne's superiority thus degraded by it. But Donne descended to a still lower depth of baseness, in offering

...

his services to help in establishing the nullity of Lady Essex's marriage.1 See Letters, pp. 168 and 180.

In regard to the Epithalamion Donne says: "I deprehend in myself more than an alacrity, a vehemence to do service to that company." (Letters, p. 180.) Considering what that company was, these words are deplorable.

There is a significant postscript to a letter of Donne's to Sir R. D. (probably Sir Robert Drury), which hints at the hope with which this Epithalamion was written: "I cannot tell you so much as you tell me of anything from my Lord of Som. since the Epithalamion, for I heard nothing." Letters, p. 153.

Stanza IV.

That is,

Page 142.

"Thou which .

Are meant for Phoebus, would st be Phaëton." "wouldst scorch those who looked on thee."

Page 143.

Stanza VI.

'The Church Triumphant made this match before,
And now the Militant doth strive no more.

The second of these verses refers to the proceedings in the special court of delegates appointed by the King to determine on the divorce between the Earl and Countess of Essex. Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury, and King, bishop of London, gave judgment against the divorce, but their votes were overruled by those of other bishops in favor of it. See State Trials, ii, 785–862.

At the marriage ceremony the divorced countess had the effrontery to appear with her hair hanging in curls to her waist, the special

1 In the Eighth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 1881, App., part iii, in the list of the Earl of Ashburnham's manuscripts, is the following entry: "Dr. Donne's compendium of the whole course of proceeding in the nullity of the marriage of the Earl of Essex and the Lady Frances Howard, 1613." It would appear from this that his offer had been accepted.