Donne[1] was educated at Oxford, but without Donne's Life. graduating in order to escape the oaths. His early manhood blended the experiences of an Elizabethan gallant and sailor-soldier with those of a theological student and controversialist. His position as a Catholic, excluded thereby from public life, and at the same time a man of as ambitious a temperament as Swift's, combined with what he calls "an immoderate, hydroptic thirst of learning," involved him early in the thorny subtleties of Roman-Anglican controversy; while another side of his nature drew him to Donne. court adventure in love and war. His strange, virile, powerful, often repellent, Elegies may record details of actual intrigues, as Mr Gosse supposes. I am more inclined to believe that, while Donne's stormy career doubtless supplied experiences enough from which to draw generally, the Elegies are his very characteristic contribution to the frankly pagan and sensuous poetry of the Nineties, represented otherwise by Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis. A soldier as well as a lover, Donne was with Raleigh and Essex at their attack on the Spanish fleet in Cadiz, and it was during the abortive Islands' voyage of 1597 that he wrote his vividly etched studies. The Storm and The Calm. During some of these years he visited Italy and Spain, and in Spanish literature he was deeply read. His appointment as
- ↑ Life and Letters, by Edmund Gosse, London, 1899. The fullest account, but not without inaccuracies and hazardous conjectures. See Beeching's Izaak Walton's Life of Donne in Religio Laici, London, 1902. Compare Jessop's John Donne, sometime Dean of St Paul's, London, 1897, and article in D. N. B.
