of the nobility, broke in upon his seclusion, and added the book of life to his studies. He saw the plays and masques of the great time; he joined—if a solitary indication may be trusted—the wit-combats at the Mermaid; and he certainly became a friend of Ben Jonson. It is plain, too, that he laid up causes for future remorse. The 'satires,' 'elegies,' and many early poems are left to indicate his state of mind; but the indication itself requires an interpreter. The 'satires' represent one natural outcome of the time. By a not unnatural coincidence three or four contemporaries, especially Joseph Hall—whose career was closely parallel to Donne's—and the dramatist Marston, were independently writing similar satires. Brilliant young men, at once scornful of the world and yet proud of a premature interest in its ways, were inevitably satirists. Their position was analogous to that of the young Edinburgh Reviewers, showing their superiority by contempt for the world around. The precedent of the Roman satirists, who had not as yet been imitated, occurred to them all as a happy thought to determine the best form of utterance. They all, moreover, made the blunder of assuming that satire must be rough and uncouth and obscure.
