DEDICATION to The Right Honourable and Right Reverend MANDell, LORD BISHOP of LONDON, D.D. My Dear Lord Bishop, By a strange coincidence, I was already deeply concerned in composing these volumes, when you, unaware of the fact, urged upon me the preparation of a Life and Letters of Donne as a work which, above all others dealing with Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature, now required to be performed. This was a most encouraging incident to me, and a fortunate omen. To offer you the completed work, however modestly and imperfectly wrought, is no more than common gratitude. Yet even had this happy accident not occurred, I do not know to whom I could have offered my volumes so appropriately as to yourself. Not only would Donne, were he now alive, have you for his diocesan, but I conceive that since the death of John King in 1621, there has been no Bishop of London so capable of sympathising with Donne in all his fluctuations as you are. He trembled under Laud, your severe predecessor; and certainly not to Laud would any friend of Donne's have dared to dedicate a life which unveils the early frailties and the constitutional faults of the seraphical Dean of St. Paul's. But I have no fear that you will not be of the ovverol. Of you it may be said, as Steele (we know) said of Hoadly: "Virtue with so much ease on Bangor sits, All faults he pardons, though he none commits." As a poet, as a divine, as a metaphysician, as a humanist, and not least as a fragile and exquisite human being, Donne is certain of your sympathy. I More reasons for this dedication are needless, and yet will add the gratification which it gives me to testify thus to our long personal friendship, and to my constant admiration of your genius and character. Believe me to be, My dear Lord Bishop, Yours very faithfully, EDMUND GOSSE. PREFACE THE work which I have here attempted to perform has been the occupation of many years, although it is but lately that I have had an opportunity of devoting myself to it consecutively. There may be one or two indulgent readers who recollect that so long ago as 1880 I announced, and then withdrew, a proposal to write the Life of Donne. It is more than I deserve, that, in these days of antiquarian and biographical activity, what is perhaps the most imposing task left to the student of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature should still be left hitherto unattempted. There is no lack of interest in the subject; there is no lack of material for the biographer; and yet this is the first time that a full life of Donne has been essayed. The causes of this apparent neglect are not difficult to discover. In the first place, the exquisite eulogy of Izaak Walton is a little masterpiece of narration which no one of any judgment would hastily disturb. It has taken its place among our classics, and the attempt to patch it up and correct it, as often as it has been ventured upon, has merely led to critical disaster. The real Life of Donne must not be, what modern editors have made it, a more or less elaborate tinkering of Walton. In the second place, the material for a biography of Donne very largely consists of a collection of letters, printed in 1651, in a state of such confusion, such errors of the press, such an absence of dates in the majority of cases, such mistakes as to dates in the minority, that no biographer has hitherto ventured to unravel the knotted and twisted web. No one can have examined, even superficially, the Letters of 1651-which, even in these days of reprinting, remain in their single original issue-without perceiving that some intrepidity |