A satirist must be a thorough cynic, a snarling foul-mouthed Diogenes, carrying his lantern into the slums and using coarse and indecent language to describe ugly sights. They had not made the simple discovery that the better our manners the more easily we can rub in a good caustic phrase. The movement was therefore a failure; but, meanwhile, Donne's attitude is no doubt significant both of his own character and of the time. Mr. Gosse insists upon the contrast between his poetry and the exquisite 'rose-coloured Elizabethan idealism.' Donne represents a change of sentiment in the rising generation symptomatic of the domestic discords which were to supersede the patriotic enthusiasm of the Armada period. It may perhaps be doubtful whether Mr. Gosse does not attribute to Donne too much of deliberate and conscious literary revolt. Donne was not, like Wordsworth, the deliberate prophet of a literary 'reaction,' But no doubt he was sitting in the seat of the scornful, and despised what we now take to be the glories of the age. The friendship with Jonson, who represented learning, and a critical superiority to people who had 'small Latin and less Greek,' is significant. Donne was the thoroughly trained scholar and gentleman, who
